As I have been reading, it seems like most people report that WM and PS go hand in hand. If someone scores high on one it seems they are likely to score high on the other, and vice versa. If this is the case, what kind of questions should be asked when the scores don't line up at all. WM was one of DS's highest scores (135) while PS was by far his lowest (88). Are there any particular lines of thought that I should be exploring or asking about here? (For anyone that didn't see my other post- the other scores were Perceptual 135 and Verbal 114 and I haven't gotten the full report with subtests, GAI, etc... yet)

No they don't necessarily line up at all, I guess to some extent poor WM can slow down PS (or high WM increase PS) but issues revealed by slow processing speed are often visual, physically with the hand or hand/eye coordination issues, dysgraphia, etc. Or it can be suppressed by anxiety, or slow methodical working, or in my DDs case by doing precisely two of each type perfectly and then putting her pencil down and watching te clock for the second half if the test... We now know she has a handwriting disability so maybe the test hurt her and that's why she stopped when she felt she'd demonstrated mastery, maybe she was just bored, we'll never know... Her WM is well into the gifted range. WM is an entirely verbal test requiring no visual or physical skills though.

My other DD on the other hand has PS around the 90 th percentile but has a poor (and variable) WM and we see the differences between the two girls everyday....

What our neuropsychologists have told us just as a general rule of thumb isn't that certain tests generally correlate, but that people who have roughly the same overall level of ability across all tests tend to have the easiest time in life, regardless of IQ. "Roughly the same" means scores within one SD of each other. OTOH, people with widely varying scores, lots of scatter, may have more challenges.

I think that the thing to do next (vwmommy) is to read through a good explanation of what each WISC subtest is testing, and think through what challenges you've seen for your ds (if you've seen any, academic or behavior). Then you'll be prepared to piece together what's going on when you get the full report. It's hard to know what questions to ask specifically about his WISC scores at this point simply because you don't know how the subtest scores varied.

In general, I can tell you a few things about my kids - but our experience might not be in any way the same as your ds, just food for thought. My ds13 initially had dips in both WM and PS, but his WM scores came up when he was tested on the WISC again at 10, and our neuorpsych said that WM is the one subtest where you may see gains as children mature. His dip in PS is related to a fine-motor disability and hasn't changed, but dips in PS can be related to many different things (and possibly nothing at all), so it took further neuropsych testing to determine why his PS score was so low relative to his other scores.

My dd8 has extremely high PS and WM scores (both are even higher than her other scores, which are also very strong). She has a challenge with a different type of memory, however, and is struggling with some of her academics as a 2e kid. You can see the high PS and WM in action in her most of the time - she works very quickly. It's great for timed math fact tests but combined with her 2e-issue, it can also cause her a ton of frustration.

polarbear

Do you have a recommendation for where to read explanations of the WISC subtests? Website or book?

Thanks.

Petunia, I found them by googling. I don't have time to look right now, but will look later today. If you want to try, I think I found them easily by googling something like "WISC-IV subtest descriptions".

polarbear