I don't have the full test results in front of me, but all I can say is I am floored. My DD had an IQ test on Friday. The tester called and let me know today that her IQ is 110. That just doesn't match up with my kid. She hits all the checklists for gifted. Using the Ruf Estimates she is a 5. I have looked at the Hoagies page and she was well advanced for all of her milestones. My IQ is in the PG range, while my husband is MG. She skipped K and still had straight A's in 1st. She screams HG+ with her insight and thought processes. I just don't understand.

My question is the tester indicated that there is a large difference between her VCI and PRI. I don't know the exact scores yet, but could this indicate a LD? The tester said she had to recheck the scores three times because she couldn't believe the score either.

Very possibly. If there is a sufficiently large difference, it renders the FSIQ/GAI of limited utility/validity. When you get them, feel free to either post the full scores, or pm me, if you prefer, and I'll be happy to take a look.

Thank you so much!

Performance was higher. I only remember two of the subset scores she told me. I remember vocabulary was a 7 while matrix reasoning was 16.

There could be quite a few reasons for the difference in VCI vs PRI scores, including LD, vision, distraction, etc. Was this private testing or testing done through the school district? Will you have a follow-up meeting with the psych where you can ask questions?

If you don't mind posting the scores here, you may find other parents who've had similar score patterns. It's so tough to know anything with the limited info you have at this point - any infinite combination of score patterns might average out to FSIQ 110 with a difference in VCI and PRI. Will you get a full report from the psych?

Best wishes,

polarbear

It was private testing. I talked to her on the phone, but she didn't really give me much indication as to what this all means. She is supposed to be putting the results in the mail in the next day or two. I will definitely post when I receive them. Thank you all so much!!

I received the results today

Sum of scaled scores/composite
VCI 28/96
PRI 44/129
WMI 18/94
PSI 24/112
FSIQ 114/110

Raw/ Scaled Subset scores
VC
Similarities 11/11
Vocabulary 13/7
Comprehension 12/10
Information 12/12

PR
Block Design 18/11
Picture concepts 19/17
Matrix Reasoning 19/16
Picture completion 18/12

WM
Digital Span 10/8
Letter-number sequencing 9/10
Arithmetic 10/9

PS
Coding 43/11
Symbol Search 26/13
CA 45/9

I am not sure what all of this means. I just want to ensure she doesn't have a LD that we may not know about. I feel bad. I probably shouldn't have had her tested when I did. We completed a cross country move a couple of weeks ago, she was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea, and she knows I am leaving for several months in a couple of weeks. I think she may have been too stressed out for testing.

medphysnerd, I have a few thoughts for you - but please keep in mind, I'm not a professional, just a mom of two 2e kids, so take my thoughts for what they are - - just random thoughts from another mom, things you might want to think about.

My first suggestion is - can you ask for any follow-up thoughts from the tester? Was you dd compliant, on task, distracted, tired, etc during the testing? Did the tester notice any queues that might relate to issues with vision or attention? Did she stop early on any of the tests when the tester thought she might have been able to continue?


There is a large difference between her VCI and PRI - enough that the FSIQ is (from what I understand) not valid. That doesn't necessarily mean she's got an LD, but it is something you'd probably want to first try to think through yourself - look up descriptions of each subtest and see how they differ, and compare that to your dd - does it match what you see in her academic performance at school?

The other large difference in the #s is Symbol Search - the example of Symbol Search that I saw when my kids were tested looks like a large "Where's Waldo" type of exercise - you have to find and circle specific repeated symbols in a large field of random symbols. The large difference there *might* be a red flag that there is a vision issue. If you haven't had her eyes checked by a regular eye dr, it's worth doing now, and it's also possible that the type of vision issue that could cause issues with Symbol Search are issues with how well eyes track together, peripheral vision etc - the types of issues a Developmental Optometrist checks for. The key is - a child may not realize they are having challenges with vision and she's young enough you might not be picking up on clues suggesting a vision issue. A few things you can look for (but they aren't "have to be happening" clues) - does she tilt her head in an odd way or wiggle in her chair or hold a book really close to her face when she's reading? Is she clumsy or does she bump into things a lot? Is she messy when she's eating - crumbs everywhere etc? Does she look into your eyes when she talks to you or does she avoid eye contact?

Re whether or not there is some kind of LD - if you determine that her vision is ok and that there are no other reasons to suspect the testing was somehow not accurate due to distractions/tiredness/etc - then the next step is typical further testing that would help determine why there is such a large gap between VCI/PRI and the dip in Symbol Search. These are the types of tests neuropsychologists typically run, and there are different types of tests based on what the neuropsych is trying to chase down based on their impressions (which typically include an interview with a parent covering school behaviors/academics, looking at examples of classroom work, and developmental history).


While any of these might have impacted her test results, there is one thing that stands out to me on her testing as a reason *not* to dismiss the results out of hand - the subtest scores appear to be very consistent within each category (VCI/PRI/WM) other than PSI with the low Symbol Search score. VCI/WM/PSI scores also seem to be relatively consistent across groups. The consistency within each sub-group of subtests and the range-similarities of VCI/WM/PSI leads me to suspect that the test was probably representative of her abilities - with a HUGE caveat. It is *just* a test - if the overall results are lower than what you'd anticipated, it doesn't change who your caughter is - she is still the same girl with the same personality traits and intellectual insight you've already noted. IQ #s don't represent *everything*

Likewise, I am not a huge fan of the RUF categories - they are somewhat subjective and also among the gifted and not-so-gifted kids I've known, I haven't really seen a good correlation that supports having faith they can be used as a for-sure data point in identifying gifted children.

Last thought - if your dd is doing ok in school now, I'd take these results just as a data point, and watch what happens in school this next year. If your dd begins to struggle in any area or if she is falling behind what your gut feeling is telling you she's capable of, take her back for private testing one year from now but take her for a full psych-ed or neuropsych eval so that if there is a hint of LD, you can get in-depth testing to understand the root cause of the score discrepancies. You could also request the testing through the school, but many of us who have 2e children have found private testing to be invaluable.

I hope you're able to get some more feedback from the tester.

Best wishes,

polarbear

ps - a few other thoughts re her performance in school so far - if she has an LD, it might be "hiding" at this point in time due to her abilities to compensate for it. This happened with both of my 2e kids - they hit their brick walls in 2nd grade for my ds and 3rd grade for my dd - before that no one suspected they had any type of challenge. I also have a non-2e dd who had severe vision issues in early elementary, and they also weren't discovered until 3rd grade.

You mentioned that your dd skipped K - was she given any kind of assessment or testing prior to the skip? How do those results line up with the WISC results?

My DS (DYS, 2e) had that sort of WISC score, where it simply wasn't what everyone who knows him was expecting to see. A couple of years later, he was 20 points higher, but it's still 20 points or more away from where he ought to be. He just doesn't think the same way as the test does. Every other test, he's 99.9+, and always has been.

What's the source of this (and what does it mean)?

1. Once you've ruled out some kind of sensory difficulty (i.e., vision, etc.), underperformance from anxiety about risk-taking, recent emotional disruptions, fatigue, etc., I would say you should take a serious look at 2e.

2. The PRI, as it stands, is consistent with MG, but it appears to be bimodal, with two subtests in the upper end of the Average range, and two in the Superior/Very Superior range, which suggests that the PRI itself is not a good representation of her ability. As it happens, the split is along the lines of the new WISC-V Indices, which divide PRI into Visual Spatial (in this case, most like Block Design and Picture Completion), and Fluid Reasoning (most like Picture Concepts and Matrix Reasoning), which further suggests that there may be a visual-spatial deficit overlaying Very Superior fluid reasoning.

3. This is consistent with the PSI subtests, which are largely in the same range as the VS subtests, except for Cancellation, which differs from Symbol Search mainly in the amount of visual organizational scaffolding provided (i.e., much less). I should note that PSI can be affected by anxiety, perfectionism, fatigue, as well.

4. Not entirely clear whether the low VCI score overall reflects relative verbal weakness, or the impact of visual-spatial deficits on reading, which then interferes with the acquisition of knowledge--and especially vocabulary--which, in turn, caps Similarities performance because of not knowing one or both of the stimulus words.

5. Working memory is the first thing to get hit when testing conditions are adverse, so it's a little harder to interpret.

There are lots of asterisks about the testing situation, as you reported, but I do think that the PRI>>VCI, WMI, PSI is worth investigating further, as is the FR>VS within the PRI. Possibly, if you pursue a neuropsych in the next year, you can inquire about the WISC-V, making sure to mention that there is both this profile that I have described, and that you have some doubts about the validity of the WISC-IV administration, given the unfortunate conditions.

Thank you all for your advice. We will definitely be looking into vision issues. DH and I both have horrible vision, so it would not surprise me if she has vision problems as well. I may have made a false assumption that she would indicate any issues to us.

My DD does have issues with clumsiness, tilting of the head, wiggling around in her seat constantly, and messy eating. I have noticed that she prefers to read books on paper instead of a tablet. I am not sure if this could relate to that issue. I guess we will be looking into this issue as well.

Her grade skip was done based upon grade level achievement scores that are state level, OLSAT scores, and teacher recommendations. I don't know her exact scores on the OLSAT, but her score had to be over 97% to be placed in our district's gifted program, which she was.

The interesting part is that I have always deemed her a verbal kid. She started talking at a very young age. She was using five or more word sentences at 13 months. She loves reading and being read to. Recently she increased two grade levels in reading in four months.

I guess we will start with a trip to the optometrist and go from there.

That makes sense. I do think mathy kids that (younger) age get short changed by the WISC IV compared to their math scores.

I think achievement REALLY matters. Whether it is great reading capabilities or math ability - that achievement is important and can indicate giftedness, IMO, in and of itself. I don't think IQ tests even claim to measure everything that goes into talent or achievement; rather, I think they only look at certain aspects of what MIGHT make a person become an achiever. They are but one measure. Achievement, on the other hand, speaks for itself. That is, if a child is consistently high achieving, but has lower ability/IQ scores, it would seem the ability/IQ test is missing something (or perhaps identifying something that the child struggles with, although they STILL manage to achieve).

Exactly.

The most commonly-used IQ/cognitive instruments only sample a handful of dimensions of cognition, while the current premier model (Cattell-Horn-Carroll) posits nine to 16 broad abilities, and multiple dozens of narrow abilities. The only major instrument that samples more than five of the broad abilities is the WJ family, which also has some issues (I am hopeful that the WJIV cleans up some of those issues, while retaining the strengths of the III.)

For those of you who are interested, this is a brief summary of the latest iteration of the CHC model, from Dr. Kevin McGrew's webpage, the rest of which is also a fascinating read:

http://www.iapsych.com/chcv2.pdf

Note he considers achievement to be a broad ability under general intelligence.

I don't recall seeing a test that addresses the learning efficiency measures. Achievement, fluid intelligence,and working memory together are probably an ok proxy. Always struck me as a bit of an elephant in the room to put so much effort into other measures and ignore the cluster most germane to learning which is also more trainable than many cognitive areas.

By learning efficiency, do you mean the cognitive efficiency/cognitive proficiency clusters? On the WISC-IV, CPI can be computed from the WMI and PSI, if you have the supplementary tables (in sold-separately reference book). On the WJIII/IV, they are obtained when the relevant supplementary cognitive subtests are administered. CPI will be available in the standard kit on the WISC-V.

Fluid reasoning is not usually included in cognitive efficiency/proficiency composites. Working memory almost always is, as is processing speed. RAN (rapid automatic naming) sometimes is (draws on retrieval efficiency and ps).

Fluid reasoning is not particularly trainable. Speed is somewhat trainable, and memory somewhat less. The available evidence suggests that working memory training does work, a bit, but only in a very narrow sense, with limited to negligible transfer. Even the best studied wm training program, CogMed, has unimpressively tiny effect sizes, but a masterful marketing program.

Phonological processing, on the other hand, is quite trainable, especially if one catches students when they are young, before they have developed their own kludge-y bad habits for approximating decoding. There are not sufficient tests in the standard battery that routinely assess phonological processing at all, let alone in any depth. This should be changing with the release of the WISC-V and WJIV, which both have PP clusters. Or one can throw in the CTOPP-2 or PAL-II, which are not comprehensive, but have nice PP measures.

Actually was referring to learning efficiency as delineated in the CHC model link you posted. Long term memory encoding, association, all that good stuff. So training in this case would be specific practice in active listening, associating incoming information with existing knowledge, etc. Formal rather than incidental metacognitive training in general has been my min-soapbox since college.

Got it now. Some aspects of the three LTR narrow abilities grouped as learning efficiency on the current McGrew/Schneider model are addressed on measures of memory and learning, such as the WRAML-2, CVLT, CMS, and WMS-IV, of which the most comprehensive is probably the WMS-IV, valid only for age 16+. Second would be the WRAML-2, which is my go-to for memory assessment (partly because of my population).

I guess I think of the strategies you are identifying as memory training as compensatory strategies (when taught to students) or accommodations (when scaffolded by staff), which I do often suggest in the recommendations section of my evaluations. And I agree that systematic instruction in these techniques is a bit spotty, despite the long history of active listening/reading approaches (KWL, SQ3R, etc.). Here and there, I find a high school English teacher who explicitly teaches one or more of the strategies to every class, but more often, my recommendations are applied (sometimes grudgingly) only to the special education students for which my evals are written.

Thanks, good to see there are some tools for long term memory testing.

I think of those more as baseline skills (with some aptitiude component) that many people never grok accidentally through school. Along the lines of my going through school getting marked down for handwriting, and not realizing until my thirties that I've been holding my pencil wrong my whole life and no teacher ever mentioned it. Or when I was in school they didn't teach study skills or note taking.

To the origional post if a kid is particularly talented in memory encoding and retrieval, then they could show a marked discrepancy between achievement, IQ, and effort.

Thank you all. I was able to get her to the optometrist. We ended up with a prescription for reading glasses. I feel badly that I did not catch this sooner. He didn't seem to think that she had tracking issues though. I guess we will try out the glasses and go from there.

Glad to hear you figured out one element of the story. Don't feel bad that you didn't catch the vision earlier. When our #1 finally got corrective lenses, one of the first comments I heard was, "Now I don't have headaches anymore!" To which my first thought was, how long had there been headaches without my knowing about it? ! Apparently for several months, which doesn't, of course, include the period of time when glasses were probably in order, but it wasn't causing sufficient eye strain for headaches to be in play.

Give her a few weeks with the glasses and see if you observe any changes in behavior or preferences regarding visual-spatial tasks, reading, writing, etc.

My son's WISC-IV results came back earlier this week, and it was not what we were expecting at all, either.

There is definitely something fishy about the spread of those scores that suggests that they're are depressed to no small degree. For example, comprehension and vocabulary have a correlation of 0.74, yet there was a four point difference in her scores on those tests.

Secondly, two of the subtests that enter into the perceptual reasoning index, picture concepts and matrix reasoning, are measures of fluid reasoning. Fluid reasoning correlates perfectly with full-scale IQ (i.e., 100% of the shared variance for those tests is pure g). On both of those tests, your daughter performed exceptionally well.

Her low digit-span score also suggests a degree of anxiety during the time that she was tested. Block design measures a narrow CHC theory ability known as "spatial relations," and it is known that males tend to perform significantly better than females on such tasks. This is not because men are more intelligent (the average IQ of the genders is essentially the same), but because such abilities tend to be positively correlated with testosterone level up to a maximum threshold. If her block design score were compared to the female population exclusively, her scaled score would undoubtedly be higher. This again suggests a spuriously low reported IQ.

It is not uncommon for parents to overestimate the abilities of their children, but I think that in this case your daughter's test scores are the result of temporary psychological impediments such as the aforesaid sleep apnea and anxiety associated with your expected departure. Her actual full-scale IQ may be well in excess of 130.

It may be worth noting that myopia correlates positively with IQ, and that this correlation is not extrinsic (i.e., not the result of cross-assortative mating). This is confirmed because studies have found that the correlation between myopia and IQ still exists between gifted and non-gifted siblings. One can not say the same for, e.g., the correlation between height and IQ, which exists in the general population but is nonexistent among gifted and non-gifted siblings. In other words, the correlation between height and IQ only exists because both height and intelligence are valued by society, and thus tall and intelligent people are more likely to procreate.

I did not read all the responses, but it seems to me that if vision did have an effect on test scores, it would affect the tests like block design and matrix reasoning the most.

DS took the WISC after a brain injury palsied the sixth cranial nerve, meaning one eye was stuck and could not move at all for months. He went to school with a patch on his normal eye, so that he would not lose his vision and he was able to read with an eye that did not track (this was kindergarten). When he was not patched, he had severe double vision at all times, but he was still able to read fluently, he just closed one eye or looked at one of the two books that he saw and ignored the other one (sounds weird I know, but that's what he said. That there were two books side-by-side and he just focused on one of them). I took him in for neuropsych testing when his eye was still not fully normal (it gradually regained tracking ability to the outside--a tiny bit each day, and the two images moved closer together each day), and he did fine on all the tests involving vision. I'm not trying to say that I don't think it's possible that a child could be affected by vision issues, but with DS, it seemed to affect him very little in terms of how he was able to function. He would run up/down steps just like before, even with no depth perception and he must have been seeing two sets of steps. Kids have amazing resilience. Sounds like in your DD's case she is far-sighted (????) but if she is able to read fluently, it's probably not bad enough that it would have affected test results that much.
That all being said, DS had the same gap on the WISC w/ verbal being lower. I think it was 114 and PRI was 141. Coding was his lowest score (a 10). He DOES have a disability--he has dyspraxia/devepmental coordination disorder. So he is slow with motor skills and that caused somewhat lower scores with the tests that involved motor skills and were timed, like coding and block design (block design was I think a 13, where the other PRI tests were 18-19). In terms of verbal skills, he had delayed speech, which is common with dyspraxia,and at age 6 when he was tested, that could have still been playing a role. I think that he continues to improve with time and the VCI probably was not a truly accurate representaion of his long-term ability. His reading comprehension scores (which test above-level), are 99th+ percentile, which doesn't go along with a 114 VCI. I think it's possible that DS also said "I don't know" to any of the questions that he didn't feel like answering. He does that with me all the time. The person testing doesn't necessarily know if the kid really doesn't know, or if they are just saying that.

I have heard of autism spectrum disorder causing significant gaps (either a much higher verbal or much higher non-verbal), but it doesn't seem like there would be any reason to suspect that in your DD. I did some research trying to figure out what this gap meant, and most of what I found involved PRI being lower. DS's neuropsych called it a "relative weakness" but didn't think it meant anything. He seemed more concerned about DS's processing speed score, which was around 110, saying that the gap between that and his PRI score would cause frustration later (where he understands very advanced concepts but the speed is not there).

If you need a test score for a gifted program (not sure why you were testing?) you may want to consider having a different test, like the Stanford Binet, just to make sure you're not missing something.

My experience has been that some areas of executive functioning are as important, if not more important, in terms of school success than IQ. Your daughter obviously has some significant cognitive strengths and it is possible that she has exceptional executive functioning which explains her success in school. Just a theory:).