Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Results in - what now and Intro (long)

Hi all

New here and feel this is a 'safe' place for me to share and seek advice as an immigrant in NZ and finding it hard to discuss any of this with anyone and have no family on hand.

The test results are in so I've come to the experts seeking advice. These are for a boy who turned 8 in November and has been grade accelerated by a year (after 6 months in school). He is a lovely boy in our company and generally we don't have any discipline problems with him. He is very sensitive and is just beginning to learn to control his emotions, just begining to watch movies that he hasn't first read the book to and about got a handle on his frustrations. We decided to test after his IEP at the end of term highlighted his inability to pick up on social cues, his lack of respect for personal space and his poor motor skills.

We also became aware during his birthday party and a few playdates through the holidays that his 'friends' seem to constantly put him down. If he came up with an idea it was very quickly rubbished (even though we could see the validity) and the others would not give him an inch in any discussions. We suspect this may be an age dominance thing but not sure. He has been in a class with other very bright kids for the past two years, this year they will get split up more but he will still be with some of them.

Anyway his results:

Wisc IV

VCI - 138
SIM 17
VOC 16
COM 16

PRI - 121
BD 13
PC 15
MR 12

WMI - 132
DS 17
LNS 14

PSI - 97
CO 7
SS 12

Comment on the report was "his processing speed abilities are in the average range and significantly lower than his other cognitive abilities. This is due to his slower fine motor skills rather than his inability to process information quickly and correctly."

His achievement test was also quite revealing with two major discrepancies - test was WIAT-II.

Word reading 132 98 percentile
Reading comp 126 96
Psuedoword decoding 129 97
Spelling 129 97
Written expression 93 32
Numerical operations 104 61
Maths reasoning 125 95

Comment made was "His written expression skills are well below his other literacy skills and verbal cognitive skills. The mismatch appears to be due to his difficulty in expressing his thoughts and ideas to paper. He appears to be showing symptoms of dysgraphia. He would benefit from structured written expression tuition". What is written expression tuition?

He also had a self concept test - Piers-Harris 2 and the results were a bit of a worry to us as we thought we had a fairly happy wee boy! Especially so for the last 6 weeks (school hols)

Most of this test was average but his percentiles for the following were 'low average'
Popularity 18 percentile
Happiness and satisfaction 24
Total score (overall self-concept) 27

comment made "he appears to feel more negative than many of his peers about his body and physical attributes and popularity. He seems to feel that he is not accepted or included by his peers as he wishes and hence this appears to make him feel unhappy and unsatisfied generally".

My questions are:
Where does he sit in the 'gifted range' His report basically says score of 130 and above is gifted but I guess I'm trying to gauge is he MG, HG etc. mostly so I have an idea of what if anything more we need to advocate for at school and also to get some idea of where we will find his 'true' peers. Also with the huge discrepancy in his PSI - is there anything we can do to help with this, given the comment re motor skills will it simply improve with time or do we need to do something specific.

If you're still with me thanks and I really appreciate any thoughts on my wee treasure.

Also if there is anyone out there in Perth WA that has BTDT and can share any experiences with me I would be grateful as we are thinking of moving there later this year and I'm getting a bit concerned about schooling options now I've started looking into it.

Jedsmum. x

Hi, welcome.. I can't say much about the scores, written expression is sometimes a thing that takes a while to 'blossom', but certainly there can be factors such as a learning disability (ld) which hold a child back, so it might not be a bad idea to read up on dysgraphia. First however, you should ask for more details on what 'symptoms' they are referring to, is it just the score or did the observer notice other things? (if they are not in the write up)

Regarding the mood screening, I would take this fairly seriously, we did have our ds10 show up with pretty significant depression at age 7/8, so it definitely can happen. His main issue was lack of popularity/friends, but he also had some anxiety related to school and in general. Per the dr's advice, we got him into some social skills training to smooth out some of his rougher spots when interacting with kids his age, and then really paid attention to making sure he has plenty of opportunities to 'hang' with friends (one on one sometimes is better than a group) he is feeling much better in the last year. (depression, when treated, goes away much more quickly and returns less often).

Did they suggest anything for the social aspect?

re: social skills training, if you ever think this is needed, here is an example:
http://www.connectforkids.com.au/what-is-connect.asp

Welcome Jedsmum,
I'm so pleased that you found us, and proud to stand in for your safe place!

My son (now 14) has a similar discrepancy in Verbal - Processing speed. For him it was a combination of poor fine motor control and slow thinking in the department of 'thinking about things that other people want me to think about' (He is lightening fast at following his own thoughts, but other people are often a bit 'unintuitive' to him.) For my son, this amounted to ADD, in that part of the weakness of ADD is 'guiding the brain to do what other people want, and keeping it there even if it isn't personally satisfying' and around age 12 insisted to try the stimulant medications and has really felt better about himself and 'more himself' since then. I don't jump to the conclusion that your son is 'the same in every way' - I more wanted to introduce myself and lay out one path.

Written expression was very difficult for my son in the elementary school years. Here are some of the things that I tried that seemed to help:
1) Occupational Therapy - they called it dyspraxia and sensory integration
2) Swim team - apparently there is something magic about activities that encourage both hands to cross the midline
3) There were visual tracking problems identified by the developmental optometrist, but not found by the 'regular doctor' we didn't pursue it, but luckily over time there seemed to be some developmental catch up.
4) Learning to type - around age 9 I did a bit of hothousing the typing, and then my son started playing an online game (Runescape) where there was a chat feature, and he got very very fast.

To me, typing is huge, I wouldn't even worry about the content of what is written- except to demonstrate a 'brainstorming picture' and teach the 'first we generate ideas, then we speed write for content, then we edit - until the typewriting is in place, because there is such a bottleneck for any kid like this with getting the ideas out through the handwriting. You could try having him speak into a voice recorder, camcorder or draw a cartoon while he's learning to type, but typing is essential.

5) Every once in a while I'd pull out the printing resources from 'Handwriting without Tears' or even evaluate him on their 'The Print Tool.' - around age 11 that came together nicely.
6) Looked up fun activities that also improved hand-strengthening and tried those from time to time. For a while he was allowed to saw down scrub vegetation near our driveway and found that pretty fascinating. As a female I had to constantly remind myself 'it's normal for males to really enjoy taking things apart and destroying things, even though I don't personally see the attraction.' Even if you don't participate in 'boy scouts' type groups ( and it might be interesting to let him do some of that if it's around with his age mates just to see how the social dynamic works out) they have 'handbooks' chock full of interesting activities.

On the social side - I love the book 'Good Friends are Hard to Find' - read it and follow the advice.
I think if you son is younger, and not already savvy in social interactions, and there is a bunch of 'bright boys' who are particularly competitive, then yes, he could be less popular than he would have been without the gradeskip. On the other hand, he might well be banging this head against the desk if he hadn't had the grade skip. It would be ideal for gifted kids to have classrooms full of other kids of similar level of giftedness (LOG) and similar age - but, if I had to choose, I'd let school be about academics and look for afterschool activities with boys his own age for 'fun.'

Also Read 'Smart Boys' - I don't agree with all of it, but it gives a flavor of how very 'rank order' social life can be for boys. I think it's also possible that the teacher in their classroom has set the tone for this. Worth checking out. When my son was in 2nd grade, his 'deep' questions so exasperated the teacher that she model this dismissive attitude, and the kids sure enough 'learned' it. This was reported to me by one of the school personnel who went to observe the classroom - but not in so many words...obviously.

How to know if the work is to his level?
1) Backpacks don't lie - look at the work that comes home? Is it at all interesting/appropriate to his readiness level to him? Ask around how much time his peers are spending on homework?
2) Do a short bit of afterschooling to see what his readiness level might be
3) Go and observe the classroom and see what it's like in there.

That is about the only way you are going to know if the current classroom is a good fit for his LOG.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Hi Jedsmum,

I'm local to Perth. Have PM'd you .
K x

Hi guys

Thanks for the responses - at work, so I'd better do some! Will get back in more detail later.

Hi again

Chris - to be honest I am quite worried about his scores on his self concept test. That website looks great, will definately keep that for if/when we move across the ditch. It came as a bit of a surprise to us as he is such a lovely kid with a great sense of humour. We have several older teenage girls who work for us (coffee shop) and they fight over each other to babysit him or just take him out to do cool things! His teacher aide adores him and will be devestated when she finishes up this year (no more funding, has to self manage his allergies). He has a great sense of humour - cries with laughter all the way through AFV. Very caring and very sensitive but we generally thought he was happy. We are now questioning the grade skip - were we right to go with the school? But even at the end of the year when we were discussing placement with the Principal she made it quite clear that to hold him back (my suggestion to give him more confidence with his peers and a change to excell academically and in sport) would not be a good move because he was too far ahead of his age peers and is at the top of this 'gifted' group. But seeing his IQ results now I'm left wondering if we've made the right choice. The one really good thing about this school year is that he is going into a pilot class for a programme of 'Self Regulated Learning' where they get a laptop each so a lot of their work wil be typed (I think they are getting typing lessons too) and they will work to their own 'level'. I see this as a big plus and it wasn't an option if he repeated a year.

Grinty - always love your take on life... I'm looking into the OT etc, I suspect dyspraxia as well as dysgraphia so will pursue that. He does swim weekly despite the constant ear infections but it takes a long time for him to progress stages - sinks more than swims and can't keep a straight line to save himself. Has been 'rescused' twice through the hols - thought he could jump off the high board??

I'm thinking now with his results that school have him more than covered academically - he is in the top maths, reading and spelling groups, he is pulled out for extension math, science and he takes Spanish at lunch. He does chess and robotics after school. His robotics teacher is now teaching him electronics and basic programming, scratch etc. because she feels he 'needs more extension'.

I have to say that given his performance at school and in his extra curricular (they all seem blown away by him and are used to GT kids - robotics instructor has 2 of her own, she has a Phd in electronics and teaches high school math) so I was a bit surprised his scores weren't higher.

The one area that he is failing at in school is writing (well below national average) and he can't draw for toffee.

I guess I really want him to be happy and I'm struggling now to come to terms with choices we've made for him on the assumption that he was smarter than he is. I've been totally guided by others in his education and thought that they were the experts now I'm not sure and maybe if we do move to Aus we should just let him go with the flow? Thoughts??

Best be off now - got a gym assessment, new years resolution to take more care of me.

Thanks again for the support and advice, always appreciated.

Hi Jedsmum
Have sent you a PM
Cheers
abra

I'd say that grade acceleration shouldn't be guided solely by IQ scores. The fact that this one set of scores came out MG doesn't mean that skipping him a grade was the wrong move.

I, too, have a child who appears much more HG than her one set of IQ scores indicate. She, too, looked on the IQ test she took at 7 like a MG child albeit her scores were more divergent than your ds' (higher highs, lower lows). She, too, has skipped a grade and no matter what her "true" IQ, it was the right choice for her.

There are some MG children who need or do well with grade acceleration as well. Personality, drive, and other things come into play.

If, for other reasons, you feel that moving him ahead was a poor choice (say he starts to struggle academically in multiple areas), there is always the option of having him take a year off to homeschool/deschool and having him go back the next year at the grade level he would have been without the skip.

Please don't beat yourself up. My dd whom I mentioned above had some lower self concept scores at 7 as well. We did take that seriously but she really is doing well now (age 12) and has been for a while. It isn't a sign that he'll always be unhappy if you make changes to better support his self image.

Hi Cricket2

Thanks for the kind words - I guess I'm just freaking out a bit at the moment and need to breeeath...

I think it would be easier if he was struggling academically but that doesn't seem to be the case - top scores in all but his writing. Interestingly on the writing he can produce great powerpoints and gives awesome presentations and the one piece of writing he is very proud of was a 2 page technical report on how to build a covered wagon (aka Little House on the Prairie) which he had made the previous week. However last terms focus was on writing fairy tales, this was so stressful, he couldn't even get started. On the other hand he can write screeds when it comes to designing his own Pokemon characters and their attributes.

He has always been tested at the year level he is in not the year level he should be and still comes out with Stanines 8 & 9.

For me his science report was perhaps the most enlightening and probably typical of how adults view DS. Quotes from his report.

"His explanations at times are unexpectedly insightful showing that he has a very good grasp of scientific concepts".

Why 'unexpectedly insightful' ?? Like he's not expected to be smart, why is this and does it give a clue to how the other kids see him?

"He is good at experimental work excepting the odd absentminded incident. This is a product of his creative concept based processing style".

I thought that was quite generous - we just call it accident prone (thoughts of dyspraxia).

"He thows himself into every activity with abandon. Sometimes he needs to consider the task ahead of him before taking the plunge. I have enjoyed teaching him immensely".

We constantly try to get him to stop and think but are not getting anywhere fast - I think we need the cavalry but not sure who they are... Like today when I picked him up from the holiday club I could tell there had been tears. I asked what had happened and he said that the other kids had been mean to him (stock answer). Why I asked. DS: Our ball went into the middle of their game and when I went to get it they shouted at me and pushed me. Me: Did you think to stop and ask someone to return the ball rather than barging in on their game? DS: No. Me: Do you think then you might have been treated differently? DS: Yes mum, can I play my DS now?

So I have no idea if the message got through but this seems to be a repeating pattern of events when it comes to playing with other kids.

The other thing for me is when I see school reports like this I don't get the impression of an unhappy boy at school but I suspect that school for him is the opposite to a lot of kids - he loves class time and hates break time.

Cricket2, I think the idea of home schooling and letting him go back or even just letting him go back if we move might be an option. I guess as Grinty says the ideal would be a class full of kids his age that are working at a higher level and given that the education system is not going to go back to streaming anytime soon I guess we just have to work with what we have.

I'm going to explore the dysgraphia etc further and try to find out who the cavalry are to help us support him emotionally.

On the plus side my gym assessment went well - they couldn't believe my age and by all accounts my body fat percentage is not as bad as I thought