I HATE the word study skills and I think it's especially bad for gifted kids. If you look on the Pearson's site (or just input "word study skills phonetic analysis stanford 10) you can see that it actually only includes three sections (subsections within the Word Study Skills)
Structural analysis
Phonetic analysis consonants
Phonetic analysis vowels
These are PRE READING skills. My guess is that if you are on this board, your child already knows how to read quite well. My ds10 BOMBED this section in first grade and I couldn't understand it. He was reading the newspaper, Harry Potter, talking to his high school/college age sisters intelligently... HUH?!
Well, what I realized is that my son had two strong disadvantages. One, he had never learned to read phonetically. He just picked up a book and read one day at an early age. He never sounded things out. He just read enough and talked enough that he was able to "match" words in his head with words he saw. The vowel and consonant analysis are all the type: "The vowel sound in weigh is most like the vowel sound in went, break, wean or light?" Or "The consonant sound in phone is more like the consonant sound in laugh, prone, pick or pretend?" (and yes, I know that is a bad example because there are two consonants, but you get the idea).. My son just never "broke apart" words.
What p.o.'d me to no end is that the whole point of it was to see if your child possessed the necessary skills to be able to decode harder words. HELLOOOOOO!!!! If my kid is reading at a high-school level, he's figured that one out!
Whew... you can tell this upsets me. My son also has verbal apraxia, so his speech was completely awful in first grade (that's when they're tested with the second grade stanford) so any test based on sounds is tough for him. Then, add in that it's an oral test. This is because the kids aren't good readers at that age, for the most part, but many kids who are good readers would do much, much better on a written test where they can look at it and think about it. For them, they've been doing that for awhile and that's what they're used to.
Thank goodness there was an ability test component (OLSAT) so my son got into gifted and has done well, but it was heart-wrenching when I saw his subscores on this at first (I forget what they were three years ago, but they were LOW). I was all stressed out until I figured out what a lame test (at least for him) it was.
And not to totally go off... but the Stanford also has a low ceiling. My son took it the first year it changed and the differences in percetage/percentile were bizarre. On one test, he got 93% of the questions correct, and ended up in the 40-something percentile. I talked to the Director of Gifted in our district about it and apparently the percentage of kids getting all or almost all of them right was so high that getting one or two wrong could make you look like an idiot if you didn't really look at it too closely.
Okay, done with rant... it all ended fine for me, but I have no trust at all of this test. At our school, they are taking it again in 5th grade next year and I'm dreading it.
Interestingly enough, when my ds8 took it last year in first, I was so worried that I bought a test prep book and did that specific word study skills section. It actually took some practice for him to "get it" but my other ds (then in third grade and having just been tested at a 12th grade reading level) STILL had trouble with the phonetic analysis, especially of vowels.
Sigh
okay, this time I'm really done
Theresa
