Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Would testing help?

I'm philosophically of the "don't test unless the results would change something" school of thought, so have been hesitant to do any testing of DD7 without a goal in mind.

The goal I have in mind is "figure out what school placement would be least-worst for next year." Some of the options would require testing if we picked those options, but I'm wondering if testing before we got to the picking stage would be helpful.

At the moment, we're taking private school off the list of options, and I'm happy to explain the specifics of why, but for the moment, the reason is that they're more-worst compared to public. Likewise for homeschooling, which DD is lobbying for, but which both parents think would be a fiasco due to personality issues.

The public school options are:

- Attempt another full-grade acceleration. Both parents are opposed to this one, and I can't imagine that DD would agree to it, even if we were in favor. (She blames all of her social woes on the grade skip, including the one that goes "I wish I were in second grade, because third graders like SpongeBob and I don't like SpongeBob.")

- Leave her as a 4th grader for all subjects. All of us would be happy with that in theory, but I'm afraid she's going to be intolerably bored. (She's already towards the top of the class and complaining of boredom as a 3rd grader, following a full-grade skip of 2nd.)

- Subject accelerate in any combination of math / language arts / social studies / science (where acceleration in all would require a full skip by definition, and acceleration in both math and language arts would lead to pressure by the school to do a full skip). I think all of us are iffy on this one - it's hard to do the scheduling / coordination, and it makes her a weirder kid than she already is. But it would give her continued contact with her current group of friends.

Her real issue is pacing, not "I've mastered the material prior to it first being taught," and from what we've seen so far, acceleration does not completely solve the pacing issue.

I had hoped that she would be the moderately-gifted kid who found her place after one skip. I think I haven't given up hope that she'll be the moderately-gifted kid who finds that work gets hard in middle school, and is glad she only skipped once. I wish she were the kind of kid I had been, who balanced boredom with underachieving inattentiveness, instead of feeling that she has to pay attention and follow directions. (One of her journal entries was an apology to her teacher for working ahead during the math lecture!) I'm afraid she's a more-gifted-than-I-was kid.

If we had her IQ tested, is it likely that the results could be helpful in figuring out whether additional acceleration would be a good choice? Or would it be just another piece of inconclusive information? I've been trying to do my online research, and I keep coming up with studies looking at kids with an IQ of 180, which are no help at all when my kid would be tested with an instrument with a ceiling of 160.

Argh. I'd go with "let her choose her own adventure," but she says things like "I can't take that GLL class for 3rd-5th graders, because I'm only supposed to be a 2nd grader." There's a secondary question - how do I convince her of how out-there her abilities actually are, and simultaneously convince her to keep her mouth shut about them around her classmates? (I went on a field trip with her earlier this month. OMG, she offered up unsolicited "I skipped 2nd grade" about 3 times during the day.)

Isn't that the million dollar question? Your dd certianly doesn't sound like she is having fun, does she?

I think having testing done - and not just by any old 'I've tested plenty of gifted kids' tester - is likely to give you more of a feel for
a) how to relate to her LOG
b) how to find a 'least-worst option,'
c) is she actually suffering or just going through the normal ups and downs of life in dramatic fashion.

((I'm not convinsed that an additional skip wouldn't ease both the social AND the academic problems, with the idea that you can always creativly decelerate later when 'neatness counts.'

BTW - getting together with other 'similar' kids seemed to help my son accept himself. If you aren't already in YSP, maybe the test scores would open up that and other social opportunities, yes?

Best Wishes,
Grinity

Difficult. I don't really see how IQ testing would help, on the face of it. Your problem seems to be lack of any good options, rather than difficulty in choosing between them, and no score is going to create more options. (But of course, if you and DP would feel on firmer ground with test results, that would be a good enough reason. ETA and one thing YSP would do would be to give her access to other people her age with similar educational needs, which might help her past "it's not for me"ism, perhaps.)

Have you tried/is it worth having a heart to heart talk with her teacher and others at school and seeing whether they have any ideas? For example, I have friends who in somewhat similar circs negotiated that their child would not do the standard homework, but instead would do appropriate work set by them to a loose syllabus agreed in advance; I think he also sometimes did this work in class. Later, he had a mentor in his strongest subject and did work set by the mentor both in class and at home. Maybe there is scope for small adjustments that would help enough?

I don't think you need to convince her she's out there - what you have to do is to convince her that you don't want her to be bored and that it's really important that she have work to do which is hard enough that it really helps her learn. IOW, make it about what she needs now to develop, not about an intrinsic property of her. Things labelled by age or equivalent can make it tricky, but you can just keep saying "it's only a guideline, to help busy parents and teachers".

I can totally relate to the finding balance! DS told me he tells new kids he skipped "because he thinks they should know that if they want to be friends". I do not think it's a bragging issue, more of a, I don't know, defense mechanism, trivia fact, reason for his weirdness (his definition), etc?

I role played if a kid walked up to him & said, Hi, I'm so & so & am the best ball player on my team & play travel. We talked about that sounds kind of odd. Yes, he's smart but it's what he's going to do with that skill that is the important thing. It's very tricky because you don't want to squash their confidence in their abilities or alienate others either.

As far as grade skips & testing, I think testing is good to really determine what you are working with. I'd be hesitant for a double skip too but I have read research that shows kids that skip more than once are actually happier than kids that only skip once. So it's not necessarily a bad thing.

It is very tough to decide a balance between how much you want them to get their needs met vs. not being the extra "weird" kid for needing so many alternative plans.

She really vacillates.

For the most part, she enjoys the academic part of school - she aces all her tests without trying, never has homework, has lots of class time to read her books, etc. The stuff that grates on her is being required to pass time doing something uninteresting: listening to the reading passage on tape, sitting through the math lecture, reading lower-level books to earn higher-level books, waiting for the other kids to settle down. Today was a good day from her perspective, in that she read 50+ pages of The Girl Who Could Fly in her spare time.

From my perspective, she's socially better as a 3rd grader than as a 2nd grader. Her third-grade friends are more socially-integrated (not necessarily popular, but not marginalized, either) and higher achieving. Her now-second-grade friends were both socially marginalized and uninterested in academics. But that means that her friends are sometimes off playing with other kids, rather than patiently waiting for DD to deign to play with them. And she has some weird-kid-ness, which we're trying to explicitly teach social skills to combat. Other than that, I think her social woes are much more melodrama than misery.



How do we find a good tester relatively close? I looked at the Hoagies' list, and the nearest one on it is a 4.5 hour drive. "I think we'd get something useful out of an IQ test" is going to be a relatively hard sell; "and the nearest person qualified to test her is a half-day drive" is going to push me into "crazy parent who has spent too much time falling into the internet" territory. The educationaladvancement.org website is broken, and the link to search for testers goes nowhere.

The local gifted school recommends a couple of testers, who presumably have experience with gifted kids. Are those people likely to be better than nothing, or worse than nothing, or unknown-and-unknowable?


Yeah, I'm not entirely convinced it wouldn't, either. But I've got no evidence that it would, you know? My partner is very much of the "I went along with the first skip even though I didn't see the need, and now you're not happy with that and want something else, but there's never going to be anything good enough for you to be happy with, so she might as well suck it up and deal just like we did as kids" mindset. DD sees the nice green grass back in 2nd grade.


Do you get a list of the members, so you can find people close to you? We don't travel much, other than to see family.

On the plus side, we have a really gifted-friendly principal this year. She went to bat for the younger sibling of one of DD's last-year classmates, and helped her get an (unheard of) K-to-first (also unheard of) midyear acceleration. So if I knew what I wanted, I'd have some chance of getting it. But I confess to not being at all sure what I want!


I feel like it's still too early in the year, unless I want to change something up for this year - and I hate to rock a boat that's mostly-stable, even if it's not ideal. And for next year, DD moves fast enough that I hate to ask now for something that later turns out to have been too little, and feel like everyone had gone to such effort to accommodate that that I oughtn't ask for more, IYKWIM.


I think her current teacher would be willing to make small adjustments. I'm not sure DD would tolerate them. (I suggested that she just turn the sound off on the headphones and daydream or doodle or read, when she's supposed to be listening to the reading passage, and she flatly refused. She's a rule-follower, that one.) Plus, I don't think we'd be able to find an easy small adjustment that would challenge her during class.


I think I could sell her on that. Thanks!

Yep, same for DD. Social anxiety thing, I suspect.

I would call those testers recommended by the gifted school. Since there are a couple of gifted schools in our area, testers are much more experienced in testing gifted students than many. However, many still do not understand the nuisances of the HG++ population, how to distinguish HG from PG for example, etc.

ETA. You can call them and share a bit of where she is at and your predicament and see what they suggest and if they can offer something that sounds useful or not.

I do see what you mean, and if you had an adversarial school I'd agree - but since you have a good teacher and a good principal, I'd be include to trust them, and tell them just what you've told us: that it's sort-of-OK at the moment but with problems that will probably get worse, and that you're concerned partly about right now but more about what on earth is right for next year. Even if you had a short meeting that did nothing except have people agree "we'll think about it, and we'll meet again later in the year" you've directed attention to the fact that there's a problem to be solved.

I would do achievement testing at a minimum, maybe MAP and SCAT as a start, or something like that which would give you a sense of where she is in terms of skills. If she already knows all of 4th grade math, etc. that is useful information as you try to figure out how to challenge her.

IQ testing is useful also I think, because it gives you an idea of what you are dealing with, and I think compliant children often can mask just how "out there" they are and how miserable they are, and I think some of the subsets can be helpful in understanding where your child might need challenge. I wouldn't use IQ in isolation, but if a child scores a 155 I would be thinking/planning a different route compared to a child who scores a 135.

I wouldn't give up on subject acceleration so quickly. This is where the achievement testing can really come in handy. If she scores in the 97% on the SCAT test compared to kids 3 years older on verbal (or math or both), then it seems you really owe it to her to figure out additional challenges, even if you don't go the full skip route. Even if you subject accelerated only for one subject, that is one less place where she is failing to be challenged appropriately, and where she will learn how to work at her level. Scheduling a one subject acceleration really isn't that hard (well, I guess it depends to some extent on how many classes per grade are in your school). Also, does your school have inclusion classrooms in each grade? It has worked great for my DS to be in an inclusion classroom, because many of the kids are pulled out at different times to go to speech or OT or PT, etc. so no one cares when he leaves to go up to his higher grade math test. I'm not suggesting a switch for this year, but it is something to keep in mind for the future.

The social stuff is hard. My DS refused to consider a full grade skip when we started dealing with this last year, because he didn't want to leave his friends and my DH was opposed for similar social reasons. I couldn't argue with that, my DS's age and grade level friends are sweet and smart. But, now that my DS is up two years in math, he has started to realize that the older kids are more interesting and he connects with many of the brighter ones in a way that is different from his 3rd grade friends. I think he didn't really realize that friendships could be intellectually engaging (that is what grown-ups are for ) and of course, most of the things he played involved chasing other kids around and pretending to be Star Wars characters, or building Legos. I now see him recognizing that some of his friends are good for playing tag, and some are better for playing chess, and he is more open to a full skip, still opposed, but he sees the benefits.

Cat