Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment WJ III Questions

In regard to the "easy" and "diff" on the WJ-III results page, what level should you generally try to present to your child? (We homeschool him.) Somewhere in the middle? Higher than the middle? Vary it, depending on the subject?

What's the difference between "brief achievement" and "total achievement" on the WJ III? Do either of these indicate the overall level at which the child is working, or is it the level at which he should be working? I guess I'm wondering what the purpose is of these two scores.

Thank you!

I don't really know the answer to this, but you do know that you can't take the WJ-III grade equivalents literally, don't you?

With something like Math, the best way is to take 'end of chapter tests' when you start to eyeball that material could be somewhat challenging. That would work with Spelling too.

Language Arts seems to be more nebulous - try to find teaching materials that give you an overview of reading and writing development, Such as '6+1' Writing Traits. Good news it that the more one writes, the better one gets at it. I've never hear anyone say, 'we introduce Simile in 5rd grade so that we can teach Metaphor in 6th grade.'

Of course to me, the 'Unit Studies' approach is very appealing. If a kid has a lot of motivation to study 'cars' for example, why not teach the Industrial Revolution, Math that has 'miles/hour' and other Stats,books and movie and writing assignments about cars, Global Warming.

My son once spent 45 minutes 'making graph paper' because he was interested in a Math idea (and I, Queen of where things are kept, wasn't home - this is a DH story.In fact it is the story where DH finally started to accept that I wasn't making the whole thing up.) It was great for his fine motor development.
For Science and History, one approach is to take a look at Middle School Level Texts and use them for jumping off points.

Hope that helps -
Grinity

There are 9 main academic tests on the WJ. Think of it as a 3x3 matrix. Reading, Writing, Math, crossed with Skill, Fluency, Application.

The "Broad" clusters use all three in a domain, and Broad Achievement uses all nine. The "Brief" clusters use Skill and Application, leaving out Fluency.
You can also get clusters that look at Skills, Fluency, Applications across the three domains.

I would not use the grade-equivalent easy-to-difficult information to guide instruction per se. I might use those to make arguments about how bad the mismatch is for a given kid in a given classroom (when making a case for GT interventions or for an IEP). Frankly, as a homeschooler, what I usually suggest is that you look at actual skills in the various domains -- if a kid can do a skill easily and smoothly and correctly, then ramp up the difficulty a notch until it takes them some effort, and instruct there until that gets easy. You have the luxury of tailoring things to the kid. When I write reports, I do try to make notations of specific types of skills the kid could and couldn't do, to give a sense of where to start.

So what exactly is the purpose of these WJ III scores? I'm not seeing what this info is really supposed to do for/tell us. What is it that you would look at to gauge the level of mismatch you have in a classroom or subject, using the WJ III scores.


Okay, good. We saw someone who is known in the pg world, so I'm sure we'll get that once our report is sent. That's really what I'm looking for... a good starting place.

Do any of you know of any pitfalls related to using end-of-year tests as a guide for acceleration? It was suggested to us that we try that, and that if he hits 80%, we just move on. To me, 80% seems a bit low. I would like to see at least 90% before moving on. Is that reasonable?

Okay, I'm done for now. Thanks to you all for your help!

On skills-based subjects, end-of-year testing is fine. Basically you're going with Julian Stanley's DT/PI (diagnostic testing followed by prescriptive instruction) model. Find out what they know and don't waste your time on that. Find out what they don't know and teach that.

I agree with you that I'd rather see 90% proficiency on a skill. The 80% is probably coming from Winebrenner's book, and it's the only thing in the book I disagree with. I taught math. If I could insist on 95% or 98% proficiency, I would. My feeling is that if you don't have really solid skills in the skills-based subjects (math, grammar, handwriting, foreign language, reading decoding (that's by contrast to the content-based subjects -- science, social studies, literature, written composition, etc)), you are eventually going to get overwhelmed and bog down and be miserable.

The easy-to-difficult scores are related to W scores, which are basically linearizing item difficulty as measured not by the items themselves but by how kids at different ages in the norming sample did on them. That's also where the RPIs come from -- basically, the easy-to-diff are based on subtracting or adding a certain number to the W score, while the RPIs are based on comparing the W score to the typical W score for that kid's age.

Grade equivalents in general tend to be stupid for a large number of reasons (W scores attempt to reduce some of the stupidity but can't solve the underlying problem that development is fundamentally nonlinear), but educators often like them. I personally rarely put them in reports if I have a better alternative (which on the WJ I always do -- I sometimes use them in specific situations for other tests). I prefer to use RPIs and GRPIs (turning an RPI upside down to reflect relative proficiency when the kid is a lot *better* than the typical kid their age at the measured skill).

I think there's a technical bulletin on the Riverside website that explains W scores and RPIs and such -- check there on www.riverpub.com. It's really technical, but hey, you asked a technical question.

Good to know. Thanks.


This makes sense to me. My eyes widened when 80% proficiency was mentioned. I'm not in a rush, and I only have one student, so 90% as a minimum, and 95%+ as a target is what seems good to me. (It's nice to have someone second that idea!)

I appreciate the technical info and will dig into that more when I have time.

Again, thank you all for your help and encouragement.