Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion MAP RIT growth

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she's going into 5th.

Like an earlier poster mentioned, we've seen leveling off due to lack of appropriate instruction to be more likely in math than reading. Our oldest's MAPS RITs in 4th grade were in the 99th for reading and 97th for math at the start of the year. She spent a lot of that year tutoring other students and just coasting through.

However, she loves to read and still read a lot on her own. By the end of the year she was still in the 99th for reading and her RIT growth was about twice the expected growth while her math growth was less than half the expected growth and she was down to the 91st, I believe.

She is a child who is so far ahead in literacy (reading and writing) that her test scores would be beyond the 99th for 12th grade at this point, though, so unless she actually regressed, she'd still come out in the 99th even if she had no growth.

I am in no way an advocate of leaving gifted kids to their own devices to learn with no instruction. I do think, however, that a verbally gifted child who likes to read is more likely to continue making progress in the absence of appropriate instruction than is a mathematically gifted child with limited instruction. Math is harder to self instruct and few kids do math workbooks or read math textbooks for relaxation so they don't have as much of an opportunity to learn through osmosis.

There's some information here: http://giftededucation.ning.com/forum/topics/783185:Topic:6645?xg_source=activity&id=783185:Topic:6645&page=1#comments

Not lots, but a few scores are shared.

Maryann

Dear Cricket,
Your points are well taken. Thanks so much. I'd love to share book titles if you and your daughter are interested.

Are you wanting to know what she is reading in her own time?

Just so you can place her in age/grade now, she skipped 5th grade after the year of coasting in 4th and will be 12 y/o in the fall (and in 8th grade). I don't think that her reading level has been tested since 6th grade. At least, I wasn't given any reading score reports from 7th.

From what I can recall, here's some idea of what she's read in the past few years:

6th grade (age 10): The Phantom of the Opera, Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series (up until For Love of Evil at which point she felt the content was inappropriate for her development at the time), The Hunger Games, the Twilight series

7th grade - this summer (age 11): Catching Fire (sequel to the Hunger Games), The Catcher in the Rye, The Lord of the Rings, a scuba textbook (she's working on her open water certification in a week here)

I'm sure that she's read other books as well. These are just the ones I recall her reading. Not all of them are hard books per se. My 9 y/o has also read the Hunger Games books, for instance, and she's not nearly as much of a reader as my 11 y/o.

Your points are interesting. My dd9 is in that category of having gotten terribly minimal english instruction especially in writing. They seem to have spent the past four years teaching them to write, "all in all" or "as you can see." Her spelling and writing are good enough, so she doesn't get a lot of attention.

However, she also doesn't like to read much and isn't picking anything up outside of school so I wonder if that may account for her semi-lackluster progress in LA.

My oldest got no better instruction (except for one year), but she read constantly. It seems that she has picked up a lot about good writing, vocabulary, grammar, etc. just through reading good writing. Other than the Twilight series she read a while back (and admitted herself that it was very poorly written), her reading tastes have never run along the lines of Junie B. Jones.

I was one of those children who was skipped forward a year, and still not ever challenged in school. Please remember that, although your daughter is extremely smart, she needs to socialize with children her age. Putting her in a class with chidlren considerably older than her can really help her academically, but can also hurt her socially. Not always, but it could. My own son is in 6th grade, a year younger than those in his class, and attending 8th grade accelerated math. What has helped is that he has two friends who are also in 6th grade, attending the accelerated 8th grade math.

I just got my daughters MAP scores and am totally confused. She is in the 8th grade, her math RIT range is 256-268. Not sure what it all means. Can anyone help me? Her RIT reading score was 240. Thanks for any help.

I also think so.