Would you mind giving your interpretation on my dd's WISC results?

She's much happier at school now that she's in the gifted program but she still isn't achieving where one would think given her IQ scores. Math is her stronger subject and outside of class she is able to do problems such as 24,347 ÷ 294, 345 x 53, reducing fractions, and converting improper fractions to mixed fractions and vice versa. However, in school this past year (accelerated 1 year in math, doing 3rd grade math) she was in the second to last math group and would struggle with simple things and make silly mistakes. Personally, I blame it on the Everyday Math curriculum and lack of math instruction. She would only get math instruction about 2 times a week for about 15 minutes tops. We were lucky if she got that. The rest of the time she was left to work on her EM workbook independently and Khan academy.

She also has issues with making friends and fitting in. Still unsure if it is related to IQ, possible aspergers, or just very introverted. At school she prefers only one on one interactions with friends/classmates, doesn't like to be watched/looked at, prefers to eat lunch alone and if others sit across from her she will turn away and face the other direction. I brought these things up to her teacher and dd talked with the social worker and they suggested she play group games outside of school that require turn taking. I can do that at home, problem is the main area of her social unhappiness is at school.

FSIQ 149 (99.9%)


Similarities 13
Vocabulary 15
Comprehension 14
VCI
124 (95%)


Block Design 17
Matrix Reasoning 19
Picture Concepts 19
PRI
151 (>99.9%)


Digit Span 19
Letter/Numb Seq 15
WMI
141 (99.7%)


Coding 10
Symbol Search 14
PSI
112 (79%)

Thank you.

As someone with a horrible working memory, holy moly that must be awesome!
I don't think I have ever seen a WM that high.

I know, and it definitely shows. I'm amazed at the things she's able to remember. Where it really shows is when she does multi-step math problems in her head that I would normally have to work out on paper. For instance, she can do 3 and 4 digit subtraction problems working left to right in her head. I honestly don't know how she does it.

We used to wonder if she had ADD because of the daydreaming in kindergarten and 1st but now I think it was just boredom.

I'm not aeh, but it seems really surprising that a child with a PRI and WMI like that would struggle with math. Something is not right.

Oh yes, forgot to add that one. Anxiety and introverted are my top suspicions.

Hmm. The first thing I notice is that there is quite a substantial difference between her Verbal and Perceptual Reasoning index scores (and BTW, is the PRI using extended norms, or no?). A nearly 2 SD difference between the indices suggests a skewed learning profile, which potentially could signal a 2e. That, and the middling PSI (although one should always consider that Avg/High Avg PSI is not that unusual in gifted kids).

I bring this up in particular because Everyday Math is a highly verbal, writing heavy math curriculum, with an emphasis on "process" which plays rather to the disadvantage of naturally mathy kids, who honestly see no process between the question and the answer. It's one of the classic constructivist, Chicago Math-style curricula developed by verbally-strong educators. A lot of time (even when you do receive instruction) is spent on exploring and "discovering" math principles. She is strong, but not stratospheric, in language, but is being asked to restrict her progress in her area of strength to the level of her relative weakness. Without support for the weakness. (VCI of 124 is kind of borderline for a one-year grade advancement in writing, which is what has, functionally, been done here.)

As to the shyness, all of the factors you have named are possibilities. I would add that G&T programs also tend to be biased toward highly-verbal, extroverted children, as that is who teachers preferentially nominate. So now she is also in a setting that is full of these chattery, socially-assertive peers, which might make a shy or introverted visual/nonverbal learner feel just a bit overwhelmed. She probably needs a break at lunch, after struggling with the constant verbal bombardment during class.

I would suggest building her social skills by selecting quieter, less-emotionally and -verbally demanding peers for one-on-one play dates. In the school setting, she may need the quiet time. I wouldn't demand that she have to play or converse with groups of children all the time. If it is necessary to work in a group, build in restful alone time, so she can balance solo refreshment with group exertion. There is nothing wrong with being a person who is energized by being alone and reflective, as long as you gradually learn to manage being with other people, and engage in a few selected deep personal relationships.

I'm also not aeh, but fwiw, my ds had difficulty fitting in and making friends in early elementary, and in his case the reason was a combination of an undiagnosed LD (dysgraphia, Disorder of Written Expression) - he was silently comparing himself to all the other kids around him who were able to do writing assignments easily (from his perspective), and an Expressive Language Disorder (had extreme difficulty getting his thoughts out, which included some difficulties with what seem like very simply everyday forms of communication - for instance, he's been in speech therapy for years now and made tons of progress, but we still find little things all the time that he just doesn't know how to do until we've given him a script and he practices - at the moment, he's practicing calling friends on the phone. He can send an email, but doesn't know how to initiate a phone call... and he's a teen).

FWIW, he has a WISC profile that is similar to your dd's (except for a slightly lower WM lol!)... the thing that jumps out at me is your dd's coding score. Did she have a neuropsych or psych ed veal at any point in time and if so, what was noted about the relatively low coding score?

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - fwiw, once we understood what was up with my ds, accommodated for his dysgraphia, and began remediation for his expressive language disorder, the situation with friends turned around 180 degrees. So much of his isolation in the early school years was due to feelings within himself, and was not related to any kind of true social challenge. Once we helped him be successful at school, he found his self-confidence and fit in at school socially, as well as making a good-sized circle of friends.

Horrible curriculum (Everyday Math), and probably terrible teachers and school.

Perhaps struggle is the wrong word. She makes silly mistakes on the easy things and I would say story problems are sometimes a struggle for her. At home and on Khan academy she is excellent in math. I honestly think it's Everyday Math and lack of actual instruction in school. Last year the teacher would give the unit tests as pretests and if they scored a certain percentile they cold skip that unit. If they didn't pass they would have to do that unit. Even her teacher commented on how she would rush and make silly mistakes on the simpler math and thus be stuck in the lower group. However, she will do much more complex math with no problem.

The other issue, as I mentioned in the original post, is the lack of math instruction. The majority of math time (90 min each day) is spent just sitting and doing their Everyday Math workbooks independently and expected to just learn it on their own. If they don't know something they're supposed to look it up in the reference book. My dd is a bit on the lazy side and mostly rushes through and doesn't take the time to look things up.

What kinds of other settings? Noisy? visually stimulating? or just socially demanding?

Don't write off sensory issues if the amount of input seems to impact the behavior.



I'll add my voice to the chorus of envy re: that WM. Wow.

My DD struggles just as much with quite similar things, truthfully-- it's the basic instructional model at fault, at least in part. IMO, I mean.

This "discovery" model makes no sense developmentally until kids are in adolescence, on average. {sigh}

So with that said, my DD is HIGHLY verbal, and has zero difficulty with "story" problems, per se, loves applications of math in STEM, but she still makes a gazillion stupid arithmetic errors-- all the time. I think it's sheer inattentiveness to the boring part of things, myself. If she has a way to 'reality-check' her answers, she does fine, because she can apply common sense and check her work when she sees that something is off-- but when she really has no context, not so much.

This was a killer, btw, in high stakes testing. Her math scores NEVER reflect her actual ability on things like the SAT/ACT, etc. Never. She's just not technically meticulous enough.

One of my recommendations is to reduce the number of items to that necessary to show mastery, which gives high-achieving (but, um, careless?) students incentive to use a little extra care, so as to minimize the number of problems they have to do. Mountainmom's dd also has a processing speed score that would justify this as an appropriate accommodation, anyway.

Thank you so much!

What you said about EM makes sense and could very well be the culprit. I've wondered about 2e but since it's really just when she's doing EM that she has trouble makes me wonder if it's more of a problem with it not being the best curriculum for her. I guess I will have to really advocate next year for a way to get the higher math and not be held back by her EM pretest scores.

Her writing has improved tremendously this past year and she's great at spelling. However, you're right that she's definitely not like the highly verbal kids and is probably why she was overlooked as gifted by her 1st grade teacher. Her reading is about 2 years above grade level at this point (at the beginning of 2nd she was at a 4th grade level). She doesn't like to read much though.

Thank you for the insight regarding the shyness and social difficulties. You've given me something else to consider and I probably should just follow her lead when it comes to needing space and quiet time. She has always been like that when it comes to too much time around others and needs to 'recharge'.

She's fine at home and situations outside of home where it's just family, even if it's crowded. But once there's a group swim lessons, birthday parties, school, etc... it's a problem. When we have more than one friend over she'll play fine for about an hour and then usually goes off to be on her own.

has always been like that when it comes to too much time around others and needs to 'recharge'.

That's classic introversion. Period.

If she recharges solo, and in proportion to the level of output required in interactions with others... yup.

{raises hand}

Even with my own family, after a road trip, I have to retreat into my own space for a while. Headphones and music are a lovely thing that way. Might be something to try.

DD9 and I have a somewhat lower, though similar cognitive profile, and both of us have gone through the same issues in math that you describe. We've both always shown to be advanced for our development stages in procedures and concepts, but prone to bone-headed mistakes, and difficulties in translating English problems to math problems.

The first issue is related to big-picture thinking, and lack of attention to detail. The only solution to that which I'm aware of is a metaphorical rolled-up-newspaper-whack-to-the-head to pay attention next time. The newspaper has taken different forms for DD and I, due to our different personalities. I provided my own, because I wanted to beat everyone in the class, and getting marked down (and therefore not winning) for casual mistakes were the equivalent of kicking the ball into my own goal, and my competitive nature demanded I do better next time. DD needed outside support, because she's liable to think she's losing points because she's not good enough, and make even more mistakes later. In her case, we came up with an external reward system wherein making boneheaded mistakes costs her the chance to earn some money. I can tell how successful it's been because she currently has more discretionary spending money than I do (while being effectively grade-skipped 2 years in math).

As for word problems, my personal definition of math is that it's a foreign language that describes relationships. It's also entirely abstract. So a "mathy" kid is extremely fluent in the language of math and abstract ideas. Word problems expect the student to translate from English (which is a lower skill for your child, as demonstrated by his VCI) to math, and from concrete to abstract, then back again. There is a lot of cognitive heavy-lifting going on in this process, and it plays to our children's weaknesses as well as their strengths. Throw in some math accelerations, and... yikes.

My DD would typically respond to a word problem by seizing the numbers and jumping into operations against them, often without any regard for how they reflect the concrete reality of the story. As much as my DD loves working with me on various subjects, word problems sent her to her room for meltdowns on a regular basis... because in order to get her through this, I used my metaphorical newspaper on her. I couldn't do all the translating for her, or she'd learn nothing, but I did have to keep pushing her to do it on her own.

Like any learned skill, it gets better over time, given enough effort. DD certainly ended this past school year in a better place on word problems than where she started it.

Just throwing out something related to Everyday Math (our school uses it, too). I was surprised that our school used the "verbal" portion of the CogAT to decide which students might get into the higher math group, but someone pointed out to me that Everyday Math requires more "verbal" skills than other math programs (I have no opinion on this). FWIW, DD, however, who is probably stronger verbally (than mathematically), has been testing extremely well on standardized tests in math lately, and she has primarily been taught using Everyday Math.

EM can be good for verbal kids, like yours. I think the reason it polarizes people so much (google it: you can find websites devoted to how horrible EM and the whole school of Chicago Math are) is that it is very learning style-biased...and appeals to ivory tower educational researchers because it tends to match their learning style (very wordy, and prone to subjectivity).

School is exhausting for introverts so be sympathetic. I know in the real world maths doesn't come in neat packages to be solved but it still seems grossly unfair to turn maths into basically another language subject. Kids who aren't language types need to have somethinh to enjoy.

Thanks, aeh - and that is what I have started to wonder...whether EM might work very well for kids like my DD (VCI 165+), but not as well for kids who you might EXPECT to excel at math (those with the higher PRI).

FWIW, DD makes careless mistakes in math all of the time, but she somehow tests well.

Also, I suspect DS6 might have the opposite profile (strength in PRI, lesser in VCI - perhaps like the OP), so what should we do with these kiddos if the school uses EM?

So if I could supplement or replace EM at school with a different curriculum or program (i.e. Aleks) what would you recommend? (Especially considering her weakness in the VCI index of the WISC)

Her school/teacher is pretty flexible and chances are I could make it happen, I will probably have to pay for it myself though.

We supplement at home with a curriculum I like to call Old School Math. It's free. It basically just involves me saying, "I don't like that method, here, let me show you [insert applicable standard algorithm here]."

^ that's what we tend to use, as well.

Others will doubtless have great suggestions...I have had good experiences with Singapore Math with my own visual learner with dysgraphic/dyslexic tendencies. I will say that I tead-aloud and scribed work through the first five levels of SM. While there is significant emphasis on word problems (as application and problem solving), you don't have to write about them, just read them and do the math. Math Mammoth has a lot of overlap in the concrete-pictorial instructional approach, but a lot more problems (you don't have to do them all, of course), and the advantage of being a relatively inexpensive set of printable texts. But we homeschool, so we don't have to deal with conflicting or poorly-matched instructional methods, and SM is our math curriculum, not a supplement.

If you are looking for a substitute for the school curriculum, to be implemented by the classroom teacher, Math In Focus is the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt version of essentially the same process, but laid out in a style that will be more familiar to a North American-trained public school teacher. Given the differences in pedagogical approach, if I were going to have a teacher do this instead of myself, I would lean toward the HMH version, as it has better teacher support, and thus a higher likelihood of implementation fidelity. Plus, the school might already have an account with Harcourt, which might give them access to institutional pricing. And, I just noticed that they have an eText for iPad.

http://www.hmhco.com/shop/education-curriculum/math/math-in-focus-singapore-math

Dd is now in 3rd grade and they are doing a new kind of math called Project M3 which seems to have an even greater emphasis on verbal skills and writing than EM seemed to. In fact, when I flipped through the book it is all story problems with lines for writing out their responses. Dd just took the Unit 2 Project M3 test and failed miserably . Granted there were only 7 questions in total and 4 of them were fill in the blank type in a paragraph and a story problem. The others were multiple choice and about measuring which she only missed one.

I don't know what to say, there is a huge discrepancy between what she can do at school with this math curriculum they are using and what she does at home. Yesterday she said that while at the math games center her group mates were supposed to make math problems for each other but they all ended up making problems for her only because they were impressed with what she was able to do and were trying to stump her which they couldn't do. So she is very capable, in fact based on what she is doing at home I'd say she's at a pre-algebra level. She easily does the Everyday Math 5th grade book.

She is getting more instruction this year but it's still not great. For instance, a week ago the teacher just handed the math group a packet to work on as a group and there were no directions to go along with it. It's hard to explain without actually seeing the packet but it was impossible for the kids to do the packet (a sort of math project) without directions. They did the best they could but because there were no directions to go along with it and they all ended up getting the same answers or examples because they were lost. They couldn't ask the teacher for help because she was with other groups and they aren't allowed to interrupt and when they do ask for help they usually are told to go figure it out with their group. It was just impossible to do this without directions.

They ended up being lectured for their lack of quality work with this assignment. I find it suspect when you have 2 different groups (10 kids) working on the assignment and not one does what the teacher considers quality work.

I really don't know what to do to help dd. I think she really needs to slow down and read carefully before answering. I also think that she needs to work on the verbal aspect of math that they are doing, but I hate that her natural math ability is being squashed and her actual strengths aren't being recognized. How do I explain to a teacher, one that I question her ability to truly understand kids, that just because dd isn't strong verbally in math, she still has strong math abilities?

MountainMom - the problems you describe are quite familiar. We've certainly found that the combination of "math" that is really a writing subject (and writing is a problem in our house), combined with the boredom and lack of attention from too much drill, can add up to poor math performance. DS10 is a natural mathematician, but does not do well in what is called "math" at school.

However, what you describe is also a classic description of a highly visual-spatial person - great at conceptual math, poor at computation. www.visualspatial.org/vslasl.php Not a learning disability (but, man it feels like it some days). If this looks anything like your DD (and I'm noticing that PRI!), it might help make sense of what feels like a major discrepancy.

Note that everything I've read about visual-spatial learners says that if they are having trouble with math basics (commonly times-tables as an e.g.), the solution is to give them more complex math, not take them back to drill....