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The reasoning is that when subtests are combined, shared variance between them stabilizes the composite score, reducing the overall standard deviation compared to individual components.

Finding out your child is profoundly gifted or twice-exceptional can be confusing and overwhelming. It may not be clear where to go to find resources to support your child. The Davidson Institute’s Young Scholars Program is here for you and your family.

If you have questions about what the Young Scholars Program is or how we can support your student, please consider attending an Application Q&A session on Monday, January 27th, 2025 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time.

Learn more more and register: https://www.davidsongifted.org/gift...admissions/young-scholar-application-qa/

I have no professional experience with this, but if it's the school that's pushing for advancement I would consider it. I think it can be difficult for elementary teachers to differentiate instruction, and it may depend on the luck of the draw with a motivated teacher.

I do think it's beneficial that he's on the older side for a kindergartener - so it's not like he'll be miles behind other kids in age or socially. I assume your district has a Fall cutoff for kids turning 5 for kindergarten, so I assume he'll be the youngest in the class, but potentially only by a few months. My child has a late summer birthday, so she's almost a year younger than some of her classmates already, and so I'd hesitate to advance her if that was an option just from a social perspective.

Good luck!

You go girl! 🎉 I don’t even know you but you’re a local and I’m so very proud of you and I can’t wait to see all the big things you accomplish in your life. God bless you and your family! Congratulations to your brother! They should do an update on him.

To support your mathematically gifted 12-year-old, consider enrolling them in advanced online programs like Art of Problem Solving or Brilliant for flexible learning, and explore dual enrollment for high school courses. Encourage social connections through math clubs or competitions, and engage them with project-based learning to maintain their interest.

“Allowance” is a positive step on the way to obtaining a patent.
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1303.html
https://www.sbir.gov/sites/all/themes/sbir/dawnbreaker/img/documents/Course16-Tutorial1.pdf
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s203.html

Great job on creating the NWEA Score Percentile Calculator! It’s a valuable resource for parents and educators, especially when schools don’t provide percentile data. Your insights on the test's limitations are also important for understanding the results. Thank you for sharing this tool!

Good morning!  I'm feeling frustrated and conflicted about supporting my child this morning, and some googling brought me to this group so...here I am!

A (long) bit of background.  My daughter is nine, and in fourth grade, and I believe has a super unique profile that I'm still trying to figure out how to support.  Without going into too much detail, but for some context, my daughter was born prematurely and has a fairly serious chronic illness.  Day-to-day she has relatively limited stamina and can get tired easily.  She was late on basically all of her developmental milestones, particularly physical milestones, and struggled with speech articulation.  Therefore, she received services from Birth to 3 since she was a few months old, and when she transitioned to public school at 3 she was automatically put onto an IEP, with speech as the primary focus.

Since she started school, we've never had particular concerns with her cognitive abilities.  That said, she was notably late in learning to read - although I always kind of suspected she just didn't want to.  She was put into intensive reading intervention in 1st grade and we were told she may take a few years to catch up because she was so far behind...but then a light bulb went off at some point and she finished 1st grade ahead of grade level for reading. Since then, she has always been in the 99th percentile on reading assessments, and is now a voracious reader.  According to her teacher this year, she got the highest score on their beginning of year reading assessment.  

Historically, she's always been described as a sweet, compliant, and cooperative student, but nothing off the charts.  She presents as a bit spacy in class, but from K-2 was on grade level academically, except for reading where she began to pull ahead after the slow start mentioned above.  To be honest, we've always been so focused on her medical issues that we were just thrilled she was about on par with where she should be at school, but we've never pushed her.  

Fast forward to 3rd grade.  At the beginning of the year (unbeknownst to us at the time) our district has all 3rd graders take the InView test to help filter kids for the gifted program, which begins in 4th grade.  My understanding is that this is like an IQ test light that kids take on computers in class.  My daughter's scores on this were a bit all over the place - ranging from 39th to 87th percentile on the subtests, with an overall score in about the 65th percentile.  This result did not flag her for inclusion in the gifted program.  The gifted teacher also observes kids in the classroom for inclusion, but she didn't get flagged there either (I kind of suspect that the teacher mostly focuses on kids with a high InView score, and my daughter is historically pretty quiet in class).

Toward the end of 3rd grade, we learned that she was going to be transitioned out of her IEP since she had met all of her speech goals.  As part of the transition out of the IEP, the school told us that they wanted to rule out any cognitive issues that would necessitate additional support, so we gave the green light to any testing they wanted to do.  It turned out that this included a Psychoeducational Evaluation from the (amazing) school psychologist, which in turn included an administration of the WISC-V. 
The results here were unexpected and kind of threw us for a loop.  The report was glowing as to my daughter's cognitive abilities, as well as the curiosity and creativity she showed during testing.  I'm not sure if I'm summarizing this correctly, but she scored at or above the 99th percentile in Verbal Comprehension and Fluid Reasoning, and above the 90th percentile on Visual Spatial and Working Memory. The only notably lower score was in Processing Speed, which was at about the 65th percentile. The report noted that as to the Processing Speed, this may have been challenging to her "due to anumber of reasons such as possible fine motor challenges, or a greater desire to perform more accurately than quickly. Her performance was precise, but with average range pace."
This tracks with how she is in person - she moves at her own pace.  Overall, both her GAI and Full Scale IQ were at 99%.

So - we went from basically just being happy that our medically complex child was managing at school, to realizing that she may actually be gifted and need more support.  All of the sudden, our mindset shifted to wondering whether she's kind of spacey and disconnected at school because she is actually kind of...bored?  In hindsight, she's mentioned being bored or school being "too easy" in the past, but I just kind of brushed off the comments figuring she was just not into it.

The school psychologist recommended our daughter be considered for the gifted program, but (very very long story short), she was not admitted, much to our frustration.  Despite her background, she apparently doesn't meet the profile of a child the district thinks should be in the program.  I don't think that the program would make that much of a difference, to be honest, but she would get pulled out of the classroom a few times a week for extra activities with other (presumably bright) students.

Now, she's in 4th grade and I'm beginning to get frustrated with how to support her at the school level.  On state standardized testing from the end of 3rd grade, she got the highest possible score for ELA. and pretty high for math. Yet - she has started to be really resistant to doing schoolwork in class in a timely manner, outright refusing to do math practice. Bizarrely, we found out that she has not been reading the assigned book for her class book club - despite the fact that she reads for 2-3 hours a day for pleasure at home.  We've tried to raise the issue with her at home about her resistance/motivation levels, but she gets frustrated and can't really explain to us what's going on.  I really don't want to push her too hard, but I do want her to be happy and fulfilled at school.  I don't want the situation at school to get to the point where she's frustrated or starts to lose confidence.

We are trying to get her into the gifted program again this year, but I'm a bit at a loss of how else to support her at the school level.  She seems to be kind of disconnecting in class, and appears disorganized, and I'm not sure how to help or what supports to push for.  Outside of school, she has started piano lessons which she loves, and the teacher (unprompted) told me that she appears to be gifted with music.  We also recently started Mathnasium for math enrichment to help her gain some confidence and enthusiasm about math, which she also loves.  We make weekly trips to the library for new books, and she gets 2-3 weekly kids magazines, which she devours as soon as she gets them.  I'm hesitant to pile on more extracurriculars, and am just frustrated with how to better support her in the classroom, where she spends most of the day.

In conclusion - is there anything obvious I should be pushing for?  Or, should we just continue to focus on enrichment outside of school and figure the school aspect will work itself out?  I'm not trying to be a tiger mom or push my wonderful kiddo too hard, but I just don't want to look back and wish I'd done more to support her. Apologies for the novel, but would appreciate any input from other parents!

If you feel that the diagnostic tests didn’t fully reflect his abilities, it might be worth having a conversation with the gifted teacher or school counselor to express your concerns. You could ask for a reevaluation or additional support to ensure his full potential is recognized, especially if the previous year’s results showed his strengths in both math and ELA. It’s also okay to explore other options like the charter school, but it could be helpful to clarify what services your son would receive at the new school first. Every school has its own process, so advocating for him could be a good next step.
You can refer to advice from the public on how parents can best advocate for their children's education here:
https://giftedissues.davidsongifted...y_Advocacy_as_a_Non_Newt.html#Post183916 Basketball Legends 2020

Yes, I totally agree with your reading. Books are an endless source of knowledge for children, encourage as much as possible!

Eagle Mum, Thank you for taking the time to share your experiences. I appreciate hearing from someone who has more experience than I do. And I do think your experience is relevant, given the standardization of the curriculum.

I appreciate your mentioning the competing demands of turning in assignments and really learning the material. I had also wondered about the amount of learning versus amount of submitted work. I can imagine that a high volume of work would require that students are less invested in learning the material while they worked to stay afloat with all of the assignments.

Thank you again for your insight. It is very helpful.

I don't have a child in this situation, but I was in a situation where I was a gifted child not in a gifted learning environment. I attended the most highly ranked public school in my area for K through 4th grade and was in the gifted program there (7 of us accelerated into a higher grade level for reading//language arts and math each day). Despite this, I was terribly bored and did not enjoy school. My grades started declining even though everything was so easy. I didn't even pay attention at school after a few years. My teachers would hand out worksheets and I'd finish my assignment before they had passed out the work to the rest of the class.

My father helped nudge me to move to an all-gifted school, despite my guidance teacher telling my parents that I would fail there and despite my ambivalence. He had had a similar experience in school of being terribly bored and eventually dropped out of school despite perfect grades and test scores because he did not see the point of showing up.

Anyway, I moved to a gifted school, and, for the first time, I was surrounded by very smart people, including people who were much smarter than me. It was life changing. I became engaged in school and loved every minute of it, despite having massive amounts of work and studying to do. I made so many more friends than at my previous school because I could relate to them and be myself rather than trying to figure out how to socialize and attend class with people who had such different ways of seeing the world and interacting with it.

Now I also have children who are highly gifted. In my opinion, having gifted peers is so much more important than having a teacher who has a gifted certification or training. My children have encountered many teachers with the supposed gifted education background, but outside of an environment that fully embraces that culture, it kind of falls flat. We supplement a lot of "education" outside of their school because the school is not ideal for profoundly gifted children, but the culture is there, and it provides the supportive environment for the sort of nerding out that is not present in many places. The environment nurtures them in a way that encourages them both in and out of the classroom to be their brainy selves and provides a relatable peer group.

On the webpage https://conferenceindex.org/conferences/gifted-education, I see a link labeled "Submit your event for FREE."

Can Gifted Education Help Higher-Ability Boys from Disadvantaged Backgrounds?
by David Card, Eric Chyn & Laura Giuliano
NBER working paper
December 2024