I apologize ahead of time for my ignorance in the area of tests and scoring. I'm trying to learn and make sense of all of this!

My DD was given the DAS. Does the IQ score from that test translate differently to a Stanford Binet or Weschler score?

Also, I know the PPVT is not an IQ test but do her scores correlate to IQ?

http://alpha.fdu.edu/psychology/Validity.htm

This is also interesting, I think:
http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/About_GDC/newiqtests.htm

Does that help?
Grinity

My son got the WISC at 6 years 9 months (school setting) and the DAS at 7 years 3 months (private assessment) while we explored the possibility of learning disabilities. The WISC could not be repeated in that time frame, and in some ways I am a bit sorry we didn't wait longer because there are such wild swings between the verbal scores on those two tests the combination of all results was even more confusing (perceptual/visual remained pretty stable in the bright range and so did working memory in the impaired range, which didn't seem to bother anybody).

I am still trying to figure out if the comprehension subtest of the DAS is even comparable to the comprehension subtest of the WISC, since my son went from 50th to 99.9th percentile between the two tests.

I am also starting to wonder how much tester bias influences all that testing (not necessarily only IQ/achievement, but all neuropsychological assessments), in my most paranoid moments.

I'll also note that the DAS seems to be considered a more fine grained tool for assessing kids for learning disabilities than the WISC. What was the contest of your testing?

Wow. That's one wild swing. I, too, wonder about testing. I've decided to think of it as a "snapshot of my child's abilities on a particular day and dc's ability on that day to show them to the tester"

She was just a little over the 3 at the time of testing. We took her in for an evaluation for behavior issues. I had no idea they would give her an IQ test so it all came as a surprise to me. She (now almost 4) just did the PPVT a couple weeks ago as part of a speech eval for auditory processing issues.

That does help me understand the comparisons a little better. Thank you!

Did the behavior issues resolve? Did the DAS shed light on what was causing the behavior?

The psychologist said her behaviors were most likely attributed to high IQ. She is a perfectionist and very intense child. I really have no idea what to do to help her!

Transforming the Difficult Child Workbook: An Interactive Guide to The Nurtured Heart Approach [Perfect Paperback]
Lisa Bravo (Author),

Billed as a parenting book for parents of children who are 'Extra-Intense, Extra-Sensitive, OR Emotionally Needy'

Mine is 15 now, and a 'gentleman' most of the time - but he certianly qualified for all three of the above. (which is why I asked - it was so hard to find a 'disipline book' that didn't make things worse!)

We've got lots of suggestions from BTDT Moms and Dads.

If your DD was in Daycare with agemates did you stick with it or find a place that fit her better?

Search 'Sleep' and 'Argue' and 'OverExcitabilities' - at the very least you'll see you aren't alone!

Smiles,
Grinity

She goes to preschool two days a week but complains that other children do not want to play with her. I've seen her try to play with other children and it's awkward. The other kids always end up getting bored with her or just stand there looking lost. The preschool teacher even told me the other kids stand and stare at DD while she builds elaborate structures out of blocks.

I do need to search the keywords you mentioned. Is not sleeping a gifted trait by chance? DD requires little sleep which is driving us all nuts. She's non-stop!

Thank you for all your help. It's hard to find legitimate info about kids who are identified early on. Not to mention lonely.

I think it is more a matter of assumptions. I guess that because I was ID'd very early as gifted and people often commented on how bright my DS7 was I decided that all of his social issues, like mine, were driven by his (supposed) giftedness.

When he started elementary school with a bang or three we asked for a formal assessment to check for learning disabilities (some dyslexia runs in my family). The results... averaged as average (although there was so much spread between sub-scores they couldn't even calculate a GAI), which the school pointed to as proof that all with OK with him, but the psychologist we were consulting with (and which specialized in LDs) saw as a boatload of indicators for LDs.

When the Asperger's label started being mumbled about at school we got a second, private evaluation from a psychologist who specialized in ASD kids instead... and she diagnosed him with Asperger's.

And now I have been reading extensively about Asperger's, and its presentation in girls, and I started thinking that maybe *that* was my own diagnosis (the oddball who never fitted at school after the early years)... except that all those signs also fit the case of a gifted child who cannot find peers to connect to.

And so we are back to square one, and I am still confused.

I feel that wherever we go we get handed the label we ask for... So, if I bring my son to somebody specializing in gifted kids for a third round of cognitive testing will I get a diagnosis of giftedness? (just kidding! Although I still don't get how comprehension jumped so much in 4 months between WISC and DAS, unless they measure completely different things despite the identical names. Which I guess is the most likely answer).

You might want to check out the book "Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children and Adults" by James Webb. It does a pretty good job of helping distinguish between the presentation of giftedness and disorders that may be confused with it, or be co-occurring.

BTW, if you ever did want to get a third evaluation, from someone who is familiar with highly-gifted and 2-E kids and who could help you untangle what was what, Ed Amend comes very highly recommended.

There is no "comprehension" subtest on the DAS-II. The verbal subtests are most similar to WISC-IV Vocabulary and Similarities.

Overall, speaking as a user of WISC-IV (and other Wechslers), DAS-II, WJ-III-Cognitive, K-ABC-II, and SB-5, I would say that the DAS-II does the best job of separating various factors (e.g, not conflating visual processing with fluid reasoning and processing speed), and in allowing a tester discretion to choose an item set that is not tortuously easy for a gifted kid (one of my big complaints about Wechslers), with some nice options for out-of-level testing (giving a young child subtests that are designed for older kids and still being able to generate a normed score). It also provides a general cognitive ability score that doesn't load on Working Memory and Processing Speed, so the general score is more properly compared to a WISC GAI. I find that I can generally interpret the information I get on it without needing to do supplementary testing. It's become my go-to IQ test for most purposes, both the "how smart is this kid and what should we tell the school?" kinds of questions and the "why on earth is this kid acting out the way he is and what can we do about it?" kinds of questions.

However, I would not put much stock in IQ testing done at age 3. You're really testing how well the kid can cooperate with the tester, and kids that age vary widely, minute to minute, in terms of how well they can cooperate. Very likely that if you come back and test a few years later, you'll see some differences. I personally don't like testing kids younger than 5 (I've tested a few 4yo once the parents were really well-informed of the limits of reliability and my opinion that most of the time, we don't need to test young kids at all). If the kid was referred for behavioral problems, then fine, you test (within whatever you can manage to do given the behavioral problems!), but you also do other diagnostics to understand the behavior problems better.

Most diagnostic evaluations start with an IQ test, regardless of the reason for referral. It's not about the IQ per se, but about getting a nice broad sample of behavior.

The PPVT-IV is not an IQ test. It is a receptive one-word picture vocabulary test. I say a word, and you have four pictures to look at. You point at the picture that matches the word. I could look in the manual to get more info, but my guess standing on one foot is that it would correlate most highly with Wechsler-test Vocabulary or Information. Those are expressive language, though, and sometimes kids will do a lot better in the recognition format of the PPVT-IV.

I have DAS-II results for my son that include Verbal Comprehension (http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....iguring_out_test_results.html#Post111517). Does that make more sense?

Wait, random googling shows that it has indeed nothing to do with what the WISC calls comprehension:



And this test is normed up to 6:11??? OK, I am officially abandoning any hope of figuring this stuff out . My son was 7:4 when the test was done .

OK - so the social picture you are painting suggests that it's worth a try to see how she does in a preschool classroom with kids who are one or two years older than her. Not a gaurentee, but certianly worth a trial.

Have you asked the preschool to give her a try in an older group?

Yes - some gifted kids sleep much less than others their same age - we have 2 groups -
1) Kids that just plain need less sleep, and
2) Kids that need just as much sleep, but kind of speed up when they are tired and so have trouble getting the full amount of sleep they need. So kids find it boring and uncomfortable to 'dull out' and wait for sleep.

It's sort of hard to tell the difference, unless you figure out how to get your kid to bed earlier for a few weeks and then say - "wow, she seems so much happier" not easy if you've got one who truely needs less sleep!

use sleep as a search term here and see!

Smiles,
Grinity