(Realized I was threadjacking another thread so started my own.)

So I hear a lot about how gifted kids almost always have lower processing and working memory scores. To me, this begs the question: so, then, who scores HIGHly on these measures, and why? I assume that there are kids out there getting 120-140+ on these subtests, right?

I was, for instance, wondering if higher scores on these measures tend to be more typical of bright high achievers with lower, more even test profiles. Could it be? Perhaps the high processing speed/high memory kids are the "not quite gifted" kids who miss the program cutoff but are very strong in school--conventional high achievers? I knew some kids like this in school and they seem to have gone on to do very well in life...

I don't actually have any test results on DD's processing speed. (She was tested with the RIAS, which I think doesn't really measure it.) But I suspect that it's high. She's very fast with stuff and has few of the issues in school that many gifted kids seem to have. Basically, she speeds through her work, gets it all right, and then draws pictures on the back. (The work's too easy, of course. But too-easy work doesn't seem to preclude these issues in other kids.)

BTW, I don't really know much about all this IQ stuff, in case that's not obvious. I do find it interesting, though.

I don't know that all gifted kids have low processing speed or memory scores. Maybe those of us who have kids with that profile just complain about it more b/c it presents challenges.

I was given two IQ tests over the course of my lifetime and came out at or above the 99th percentile on processing speed both times. However, I also had high scores on VCI and PRI or whatever the adult equivalent is. My working memory is above average, but not in that upper 90s area so I guess that is my weak area. I think the kids ate my brain -- lol!

I do know a very few kids with high WMI and/or PSI scores that are not supported by higher than average VCI and PRI scores and they are much higher achievers in a school setting than one would predict based upon IQ. I would think that having those supporting skills would enable one to do the work quickly, not make mistakes, and get very good grades assuming you are of at least average intelligence. Kids who look like that make up a large majority of the kids in our local GT/accelerated classes b/c they have the high achievement (grades, NCLB test scores) to get in.

I don't think I've seen any evidence to suggest that "gifted kids almost always have lower processing and working memory scores." You may hear about a lot of kids with that profile on boards like this one, because discrepancies in scores can lead to bottlenecks that can cause issues for children.

And I may be in the minority on this, but I think that the WISC-IV tests for processing speed and working memory are not the last word on speed and memory skills.

You know the old saying there are people who can see the trees and those who can see the forest. I look at it as there are people who can see the leaves, trees or the forest. The academic world is mostly made up of skills related to those who can see the leaves and in some cases the trees.

My opinion is the IQ and processing speed tests are biased toward primarily leaf related skills. Those who do extremely well on these tests will often do quite well academically, but have limited potential to deal see the trees and to a greater extent the forest.

Whereas those who score fairly high, but not at the top end may be shifted more into the tree range. In this case, they are more rounded.

Those who score low may in fact be very good at forest type skills, but as these are not tested in the academic world, their skills are often overlooked.

I don't think it is quite as simple as this.

I'll agree with you on that one. My dd12 probably does truly process much slower than her other abilities, but I suspect that my dd10's PSI score came out lower b/c she made a ton of mistakes. Attention to detail is not her strength. I wasn't told that was the cause for her scores (it's just my suspicion), but she really is a pretty fast kid who is highly error prone.

"the kids ate my brain". I'm going to start saying that irl ,cricket

I've never been officially tested on processing speed, but I'm a forest person, and that just adds to my processing speed. WM is my bottleneck. DS14's PS is glacial, but his WM is WOW! He can even see organic chemistry equations doing their little dance on the blackboard of his mind - and I am SOOO jealous of that....

I don't think that most gifted kids have some kind of bottle neck - but plenty have one, and a few have two. It's more fair to say that the assumption that WM and PS will be high if the more 'g' loaded subscales are high just doesn't hold up to real life.

Smiles,
Grinity

By "lower," I don't mean "lower than average"--lower than other scores? I thought it might be a function of these kids being harder to serve, too, but a quick Google seems to reveal that the conventional wisdom is that processing speed really is often relatively low in gifted kids...or it's low by the measures commonly used, anyway. I agree that these measures may be off in some way.


I was wondering just this--are these the kids who score high on achievement and not as high on IQ?

I realize that you meant lower than their other scores, but I would still question whether most GT kids have lower PSI and working memory scores. Personally I don't believe that. I think that you hear that a lot online because parents tend to worry when some index is lower than the others. I don't think it's uncommon, but I doubt that it's most.

I would not be surprised, however, to see kids with higher memory and speed scores doing very well in school. Memory and speed are certainly valuable skills in an academic context.

Yes, they are kids who have higher WMI and/or PSI (115-125ish), around 50th percentile scores on PRI and VCI, and who score in the 90s on achievement tests -- assuming that their parents are telling me that truth, that is. One of the moms of one such kid has told me that she thinks the IQ is off b/c her kiddo achieves so highly, but she's also tested IQ more than once and gotten pretty consistent results that look like that.

eta: I am, of course, hypothesizing that there are a lot more kids in the local accelerated programming who fall into this category. I doubt that many of them have taken IQ tests. My hypothesis is based upon a few things:

*I've had more than one GT coordinator tell me that she believes that most of the kids who are GT ided are high achievers, not gifted;
*Both of my kids' schools have between 16-25% of the kids in the GT classes and/or GT identified. Our neighborhood is truly not that skewed from the norm, so these classes have to be filled with someone other than gifted kids and I know that the kids in these classes are at least performing in the upper 10% on achievement tests or above, for the most part;
*DD12, who is a very bright kid and likely a 1 in 100 or so type, was so drastically different than the majority of these kids that she's needed a lot more acceleration than I'd think she would need if she were in class with other gifted kids (even if they were somewhat lower on IQ; the large majority of her age mates who are GT ided appear a lot lower in terms of IQ -- yikes, I feel like a jerk for saying that!).

from here:

http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/PDF_files/NewWISC.pdf

I hope not. I don't know what my scores would be, but my processing speed is fast (eg my son's DS brain game for math facts can't really keep up with me and I feel like the world moves in slow motion sometimes). But I like to think I'm pretty good at integrating details into a whole.

Does that make sense? Did I misunderstand something?

On a related note, there are disadvantages with fast processing speed, too. They just aren't as obvious. For example, sometimes I may confuse people when I use keyboard shortcuts and everything on the screen changes in a flash without explanation, or I may come across as being impatient or rude when in reality I've just made a decision and started acting on it quickly/too quickly. Doesn't mean I'm always right. It just means that I move quickly.

Anyone else?

Val

Sounds like my DD.

Me too. Since I work as an educator (not at a school), I've learned to move outwardly at different paces, though. I do recall thinking that the people I trained in prior jobs when I was in my 20s were idiots, though, where the problem was more likely that I was moving through everything much too fast for them to catch on.

Grinity and Val,

Sounds like I came to the right place as you both caught the problem with what I had said. This is where the it is not quite as simple as this line comes in.

In my opinion, we are double specialists. So for instance, I consider myself a F-L, forest plus leaf with no idea what a tree looks like. People may be F-F, F-T, T-T, T-L and L-L.

I consider T-Ls to be the best at fact based memory skills.

This is my somewhat less simple version.

My kids scored very high and quite balanced on IQ testing. They are definitely not "just" conventional high achievers, but they do find school type stuff very easy and fly through it. When one was assessed for reading comprehension in K, the reading specialist was a little freaked out that he could answer the questions in the exact language from the passage he'd read once or paraphrase to show he understood it. Multiplication tables were learned in about 5 minutes. Things that depend a great deal on memory like languages, vocabulary, spelling, arithmetic are all really easy for them.

I don't think the tree/leaf/forest concept works for these kids. It's not that they have good memory and therefore necessarily have poor creativity or abstraction. Some kids really are just good at creativity, abstraction, and detail. They do big picture well and small picture well. They don't only know arithmetic because math facts are easy, rather because that took no effort, they can move on to learning more abstract concepts really early. And since those are easy and they arej really fast, then they learn harder stuff faster too . . . . . .

I'm sure that kids come in all flavors of profiles on IQ testing. There are lots of scores posted here with isolated highs in one subtest, with high GAI but lower PSI/WMI, and with one lower score and three higher ones, etc. There are kids with high scores across the board as well.

I don't think that anyone was meaning to imply that kids with balanced profiles who are high in VCI and PRI as well as WMI and PSI are not gifted but simply high achievers. I've just, personally, seen some kids who are not high on VCI or PRI, but are on the other two and who do seem to lack that depth of thought or abstract thinking ability yet they do achieve highly b/c they memorize well and process fast. They can, thus, spit back the information they just read, for instance, but if you ask them to analyze it they don't go far.

I see that Cricket, but wanted to point out that it's not an either fast or deep situation all the time.

I do think that fast processors often seem smarter than they really are because of what you said -- there doesn't have to be depth to back up the speed.

Yeah, I apologize if I seemed like I was saying that kids with high scores in these areas couldn't be gifted--that's not what I meant at all. I was just wondering who the kids were, you know? I mean, maybe PG kids tend to be really high in all areas and don't have the more typical lower WMI/PRI. Or maybe kids with Aspie tendencies often score high on WMI (isn't memory often very strong in Aspies?). Or...


I would be so curious as to how common this is and also as to how well kids with this profile (or say, a slightly different one with high-normal VCI and PRI but not gifted) do long-term. Maybe they don't have the abstract thinking, but to what degree is that a serious problem in today's educational system? Just interesting to ponder. This is not my DD's profile since her verbal and quantitative intelligence were genuinely high (but MG level), but I do wonder if the superior memory and speed I believe she possesses (for instance, she can easily parrot back 8+ digits backwards) give her an academic advantage not necessarily in line with her numerical IQ. In other words...in other words...I don't know. We know that IQ predicts academic achievement to some extent, but maybe in some ways WMI and PSI predict *success within the limited traditional academic lockstep box* in a way that has not yet been quantified. In fact, I guess I wonder...what are these measures "for"? If they do not acuurately ID giftedness, do they accurately ID deficits? What do they tell us?

(Again, I know I am ignorant about all this.)

Oh, I don't think creativity is the sole domain of the gifted at all. Nor do I think all gifted people are creative.

And yeah, i think many of the test designers have said that the tests are not intended to distinguish very well once you get to the end of the bell curve.

I'm not wedded to the idea that these measures tell us anything major. Maybe they're actually kind of useless. But if so, like I say, why are they even on the test? It's just interesting to me.

Adding to kcab's post, here's a link to GT-World (seems to be either a precursor to or concurrent project of Hoagies) that includes the quote about Weschler's comment, as well as links to source materials:
http://www.vcbconsulting.com/gtworld/gtwisc.htm

I've also seen this comment copied in various discussions of WISC: "Unfortunately, many psychologists also use the WISC to identify gifted children. This is unfortunate because the test was not designed for such use."

Both of these comments, however, are from the mid to late 1990s (at the latest), before the WISC-IV and certainly before the Extended Norms for the WISC. (And, hoo-boy, the Extended Norms are a whole different can of worms!)

Although I continue to see the quote from Weschler tossed about, I can't really square that up with the broader acceptance of the WISC in the GT-Community, or the high-profile GT specialists's use of the WISC in particular.

(And if it were not a useful test for the upper SDs, why would the DYS program utilize the results?)

Back to the initial conversation about processing speed, our son has a bit different profile from the "classic" GT profile.

His VCI, FSIQ & GAI were all >99.9 PR, yet his PSI was also up there at 99.8. (His PRI & WMI were both 99.)

Looking at his WJ Achievement test, he scored 99.8-99.9 PR on all subtests except for Writing Samples, which was a 97.

The kid is a speedy fella, but he's far from using this trait to his full advantage. His biggest problem in school right now is that he doesn't know how to throttle down when necessary. This is definitely a "grass-is-greener-over-yonder" situation, because whenever I read another parent lamenting his child's plodding, perfectionist tendencies, I secretly wish for a bit of that "problem."

I often compare our son's situation to Wile E. Coyote's experience with the ACME Jet-powered Sneakers. When the coyote first donned the shoes, he had no clue how to use them effectively and was bouncing & crashing off of everything. When he figured out how to control them, though -- yowsa.

It's interesting (maddening!!) to watch our son tackle new concepts, especially in math and music. His first attacks are invariably full-throttle, brute-force attempts and when those efforts don't succeed he gets very frustrated. He'll eventually slow himself down (sometimes) but not without putting up a fight first.

With piano in particular, when he's learning a new scale he prefers to tackle it at top speed, even though it takes him many more attempts before he gets it right. When I'm able to convince him to slow down, however, he'll nail it within just a few attempts.

But once he gets a concept (or song or scale) figured out... holy smokes... it is fun to see him fly.

This is not back to the original conversation but a thought that I've had periodically over the years. I do wonder how the test designers design questions to tease out that tail end. Sure, I can see knowledge tests or speed tests where you can look up the info or create something to be done faster than you, yourself, could do it, but I'm not sure how the designer creates an abstract reasoning problem, for instance, that tests a level of abstract reasoning beyond that which he, himself, possesses. Maybe we need the DYS kids as adults to be the ones to design IQ tests so they aren't designing a test to test greater intelligence than that which they possess.

I'm not suggesting that IQ test designers aren't very smart, just that I doubt that they are 99.9+ people. Maybe it's just a matter of testing stuff on enough 99.9+ people to ascertain what they can and can't answer. Maybe not.

You know, Davidson ought to be approached to inquire as to whether they'd be willing to ask their families about being involved in norming the WISC-V. I know that the GDC says that some of the kids they've tested are being used for the norming sample on the WISC-V, why not DYS too?

That's kind of what I was wondering. Why is the test so popular when the creator said it isn't to be used for this, and when it has all these subtests and measures that are not considered a good measure of g? (And how do we know that, anyway? From the norming sample?) Is it just the best available? Is it that it does provide a lot of data? I admit, sitting over here with my verrrry brief RIAS results, the WISC looks so much more meaty and interesting. Yet there seems to be general agreement that the RIAS is absolutely fine for ID purposes.

Someone asked "who scores high on processing?" I don't know anything about the masses, but oddly enough my gifted son scored low on processing, and my son who suffered crystal meth exposure in utero, is bi-polar, and has EXTREME ADHD, scored amazingly high on processing. To me, it is an example of how they approach life, my gifted son thinks, thinks, thinks and sees a million possibilities. My other son jumps right in and makes quick decisions based on what he sees is the obvious choice. -- Obviously, I am not saying that a high processing speed doesn't mean you aren't a deep thinker. I just think the situation is interesting in our family.

That's my dd12. I see deep in her b/c she makes connections that catch me off guard. But fast she is not. When she 10, her middle school told all of the 6th graders to find someone who worked in a field they were interested in to shadow for career day. The world smiled on us in that we found a manatee expert in the middle of the country where we live (he was doing his last few years of work for the Fish & Wildlife Service studying bats after having studies manatees in FL for much of his career).

I went with her given her age and her shadow person was showing us a bunch of old slides they had taken in FL. One of them involved a tag they had put on a manatee's tail that they found on dry land and were trying to figure out how it got there. It had some indentations in the sides and had, obviously, been pulled off the manatee's tail onto shore. Dd looked at it while I have all of these random thoughts racing through my head of bullet holes, etc. The first thing she said was right -- 'it was floating on the surface above the manatee and those look like tooth marks. I bet an alligator grabbed ahold of it thinking it was something to eat and pulled it off and onto the land.'

The meeting pretty much went along those lines the whole time. Dd didn't rush in with ideas, but the first thing she came up with was spot on every time.

Random piece of trivia? Did somebody call my name?

It's in the intro page of the WISC-IV Tech Report #7 on Extended Norms.

There's this juicy item in the first paragraph:

What do they tell the kids when they test them? Do they say to go as fast as possible on the subtests that focus on speed?

My DD is naturally fast, but if you said "Go as fast as you can! You're being timed!" I could see her getting anxious. Maybe that's why so many GT kids score lower on this, too--the anxiety factor?

I think how they emphasize it has a lot to do with the individual testers. I believe they all tell the kids that it is a timed portion of the test, but some seem to emphasize it more than others.

For example when DS9 was tested at 7yo, I believe the psych told him that this portion of the test was timed and he should work as quickly as possible. For DS7, I believe the tester (a different psych) told him that it was timed, but with less emphasis to him about working as quickly as possible.

Of course, that's from my not-always-reliable recollection.

Not sure exactly what you are trying to get to the bottom of. . . I will say that is takes all of the scores combined to get a Full Scale IQ. That is why DYS requires both an academic assessment and an IQ.

By "lower" scores in WMI and PSI as you say, a HG child will still score in the Superior range. For us, the difference between all four composite scores is 3.9 percentage points. Not too much hair splitting there.

Arthur Jensen was a big name in intelligence research, and liked to look for "g" - the underlying general intelligence factor. It was identified that "g" was strongly correlated with reaction time. I was in grad school where he taught (Berkeley) and took part in research to look at what underlay reaction time - they were investigating speed of nerve conductivity. Hilariously, the research assistant was an on again, off again boyfriend, and my speed of nerve conductivity was like 1/3 of the average.

I'll just emphasize that PSI is a really different ability than abstract reasoning, say, physiologically. Math says students "should" regress to the norm on different measures. I used to do special ed. testing for a charter school, and practically every student I tested was gifted with low PSI. I got really interested in the causation of PSI deficits, but I can't say it's clear.

Thankfully DYS isn't looking only for kids with 99.9 Full Scale IQ - LOL 'cause then I wouldn't be here - no one else was willing to explain to me that even with an uneven profile and OG FSIQ, my son is unusually gifted.

I think regression towards the mean is most of what we are seeing. If Processing speed were very highly associated with deep abstract thinking abilities, then there would be less scatter.

From the point of view of advocacy, I think having 120 or more Processing speed helps a child fit into most school's notion of 'what a gifted kid should look like.'

I think that having fast processing speed is a lovely addition to High Verbal and Perceptual. It helps people think deeply 'fast.' I suspect I'm very fast but more bottlenecked in the WM department, so go easy on me when we meet in person and I've forgotten your name! Here I can 'search' and read up on folks before I try to answer posts - wish I could do that in real life! I also notice that I can type faster than my inner voice can speak, so internally I'm processing even faster than my awareness. When I first started posting here I was quite often surprised at where my posts ended up!

Smiles,
grinity