Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Active Threads

I’m not sure about the selective schools in your area, but here, in my part of Oz, they are mainly filled with students from highly aspirational families, with above average intellect which have been honed by hours of extracurricular coaching and tutoring. When my son was 9, he eagerly anticipated meeting like-minded kids in his Yr 5 opportunity class (primary school equivalent of selective secondary schools) but was disappointed to find that whilst they were more conscientious than his previous regular stream classmates, he essentially couldn’t discern much difference in intellectual quality and certainly none were capable of sharing and developing ideas at his level. For this reason, he decided it wouldn’t be worth investing his time in long commutes to selective schools for such peers and he would instead stay local and utilise his time as he saw fit.

In the second part of the linked article, siblings, Dafne and Andrew, had their father to guide them and that was the point I was trying to make earlier. Most gifted kids have, by the nature of genetics, one or both parent(s) who is/are gifted themselves and parents who have already negotiated similar terrain can offer advice from their own experiences, if not private resources to support them on their chosen journeys. My son was very much in Georgios’ position at school, but he’d quietly ponder concepts that he’d come across in Open University lectures and only actively contributed in class when his teachers (many had acknowledged that he was stronger in their subject matter area than they were) called upon him to do so. I do not believe these experiences hindered his development, rather, in addition to giving him plenty of time to muse, it afforded him the opportunity to take a ‘summit view’ of his surroundings and that perspective is/will be invaluable later in life when the EG/PG individual will inevitably find themselves at odds with ‘thought leaders’ who influence the majority.

My son also took the time and effort to reflect on how he could develop interpersonal skills to engage effectively with a broad range of people. He is now at college and the breadth, depth and heights of activities he is engaged in is quite breathtaking. Yesterday, he sent me some video clips of his college band’s recent performance, adding that they have been offered the facilities of a multimillion dollar studio to record their music, which for a self taught musician who’s never had a music lesson, is a nice enough compliment, but that he has so successfully engaged in quintessential teen activities is a personal coup.

Warning: Scientist rant ahead! Maybe we'll just have some "bad" AI like we have some "bad" doctors? The scary part of the medscape article was the last source where the student doctor decried the lack of study in their coursework on how to use AI in their medical practice. Although the specialized medical AIs may do well in controlled patient populations and study settings when directly supervised, it does not seem that we are at the "just let the AI be the doc" stage. Even for entering the orders or health information, you'd have to check that it was correct and at some point it is just easier to do it yourself. I've tried, within the last month, having AI 1) summarize a journal article, 2) list the GPCRs that do not have seven transmembrane domains, and 3) write an email requesting reagents from the author of a journal article. Outcomes: 1) Summarized, but missed both the importance of the article to the field and the key elements that made the paper a major advance in medicine--in other words, it failed to integrate the new knowledge to the existing body of work. Also failed to find any weaknesses or flaws even when directly asked to analyze for this aspect. Every study has some weakness or flaw. 2) Hallucinated and made false statements while listing a reference that directly contradicted the AI's conclusion. Failed to find breakthrough in field (from eleven years ago in one of the top science journals) that found that plants have this feature. 3) Wrote an email, but failed to list the reagents correctly. Using this email would have required extensive editing and hunting in the paper and supplementary information on the journal's website for the correct name of each reagent.
Yes, AI is shockingly better than it was even one year ago. Does that mean it is "good enough" to determine your treatment? Who could your family sue if you were completely incapacitated as a result of the treatment? Would AI learn from being sued and the associated "costs"?
Thanks, my rant made me feel better about the importance of human minds in combining both breadth and depth of knowledge and applying them to complex endeavors.

The NAGC Tip Sheets are largely a rehash of information readers of this forum may already be familiar with, and yet it is beneficial to have the information condensed and made available in a variety of places.

https://nagc.org/page/family_tip_sheets

Related:
Here is a seasoned, crowd-sourced roundup of advocacy tips, created by parents on this forum, a decade ago:
https://giftedissues.davidsongifted...y_Advocacy_as_a_Non_Newt.html#Post183916

Forbes article

It started with an abdication of trying to find great, well-rounded students in lieu of, as admissions offices blather, a “well-rounded class” of amalgamated specialists. Weird, if well-intended, admissions policies that can actually hurt different minority groups, as the Supreme Court recently ruled, both through distorted screening and eliminating standardized tests—the best way, paradoxically, for people from under-privileged backgrounds to show they belong. (For all this effort, the Ivies still inordinately favor the rich and connected.) And then, once the students matriculate, the schools undermine the standard that otherwise makes their degrees mean anything. At America’s two most august universities, Harvard and Yale, nearly 80 percent of all undergraduates average an A or A-minus.

And guess what? Employers have figured this out. Forbes surveyed nearly 300 subscribers to its Future of Work newsletter, with three-fourths of respondents holding direct hiring authority. Among those in charge of employment decisions, 33% said they are less likely to hire Ivy League graduates than they were five years ago, with only 7% saying they were more likely to hire them.


Adds Jim Clark, who hires technologists for Kansas City’s HNTB, the nation's second largest architectural firm: “The perception of what those graduates bring has changed. And I think it’s more related to what they’re actually teaching and what they walk away with.”

Perhaps this is an indictment of all of higher education? Absolutely not. Forbes also surveyed the hirers about public university graduates and the grads of good non-Ivy private colleges, and the numbers are almost precisely the opposite of the Ivy results, with 42% saying they are more likely to hire public university grads and 37% saying they are more likely to hire grads of non-Ivy League private colleges than five years ago. Only about 5% say they are less likely to hire from either group.

“37% of those with hiring authority said state universities were doing better than five years ago in preparing job candidates.”

“Just 14% of hiring managers said the Ivy League colleges were doing better than five years ago in preparing job candidates, while 20% said they’re doing worse.”

“Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is really important,” says Laura Bier, a San Diego-based management consultant specializing in healthcare and defense. “Kids who've been to a public school have had a broader diversity of friends from different backgrounds, teachers from different backgrounds and are better able to be nimble in those situations.”

It comes down to preparedness. Some 37% of those with hiring authority in our survey said state universities were doing better than five years ago in preparing job candidates and 31% thought non-Ivy League private colleges had improved. Just 14% had similar praise for the Ivy League, while 20% said they’re doing worse, making this the only segment in which negative appraisals of the trend in job readiness exceeded positive ones.

Thanks for your insight! Check your Inbox because I put more background info there about how we got to this point.

He has been taking AP tests since 9th grade and back then they approved word processing, because his 504 plan states everything has to be digital. Last year when he took the AP Biology and AP Economics tests he was forced to handwrite multiple graphs because you can't do that with a word processor. He was able to slow down (he had extended time) and make it legible enough that he got a 4 and a 5. The 4 was for economics which had multiple graphs. Biology only had one graph. Who knows if those graphs impacted his score on Economics.

For over a year now I've been trying to get the district to address the situation with assistive technology and put in appropriate requests to the College Board. The district has basically told the poor guidance counselor to figure it out. So she started requesting anything i suggest (asking for things to be trialed with him, but they never trial anything) that might help even though he hasn't been trained and has never used certain AT. In 3 weeks he needs to take the AP Statistics test. She put in a request for Efofex Equation but it should have been Efofex Stat, Efofex graph and MathType (he knows how to use MathType). The College Board approved Efofex Equation and denied MathType and I asked how he's supposed to type graphs with that. Plus Efofex equation wasn't even on his device. So she put in another request to substitute Efofex equation with Mathtype and add Efofex Graph (she was not aware that Efofex Stat even exists). I just got a letter from the College Board where they are now denying ALL AT for math, telling him to use a scribe instead. I have no idea how that would work. He's never used a scribe. Basically the College Board was tired of requests that don't make any sense, I think.


The IEE was approved and I found someone who can assess him for AT. I need to find a psychologist that can do other testing but I am not sure what tests they would use given the handwriting issue. The district did give him a DeCoste Writing protocol whcih showed him writing 7 wpm (keyboarding 42 wpm). But there are no norms. I submitted outsdie PT and OT evals which show him uncoordinated and weak. To top it off he now has cubital tunnel syndrome and possibly dystonia and his hands feel like rocks. Basically the school district acknowledges he has physcial impairments, they just say it doesn't matter because he has good grades, he's in advanced courses, and the accommodations are clearly working for him. He has "equal access to the curriculum." I have no idea how he'd do certain courses like "Art." I'm also worried about things like Chemistry labs and holding chemicals over a Bunsen burner. Right now he's deliberately signed up for courses where he can succeed with accommodations So in their observations he does not look impaired.

Welcome, Chaya!

Am I correct that this assessment was done in Spanish? (I notice that you've listed nonstandard subtest names, which I assume resulted from back-translation from English to Spanish to English).

I'm going to start with some context on testing of this kind that is important in interpreting the results. First, it is generally considered inappropriate to interpret the scores as age-equivalents, except in very rare cases, so I've tried to give some rough approximations for what the scores you've reported actually were in normative terms, with the standard subtest names. Since I don't know which version of the WISC-IV was actually given (Spanish or English), or what the child's actual dominant language (not always clear with dual language learners) or cultural context are, I'm not going to convert these to actual numbers:

Block Design: average
Similarities: average
Digit Span: (beginning of) average
Picture Concepts: extremely high
Coding: very low
Vocabulary: average
Letter-Number Sequencing: average
Matrix Reasoning: average
Comprehension: average
Symbol Search: average

Second, interpretively, we have a few additional cautions: this is a fairly old version of the test (how old depends on where you are in the world and whether it is the Spanish version), and may or may not be based on norms appropriate to the cultural/linguistic/educational context of this child, so the results on any given item or task have an elevated risk of being imprecise in either direction (too high or too low).

So when we look at the results in terms of scaled score classifications instead of age-equivalents (which, again, there are many excellent psychometric reasons for avoiding as much as possible--but that's another, much longer story), we see that most scores are comfortably in the average range, with only two notably outside of it: Picture Concepts, which is indeed in the extremely high range, and coding, which falls in the very low range.

But let's say these do tell us something about his cognitive profile (and that is definitely making some big assumptions). It would suggest that, in the context of generally age-appropriate thinking skills, he is much better at concept formation using concrete images than he is at abstract verbal concept formation, and that his complex pencil skills are slow (notice that he did fine on Symbol Search, which is timed exactly as Coding is, so it's not speed itself that is the issue, but how it interacted with the specific Coding task--which could be due to anxiety, as you suggest, or possibly due to fine-motor coordination and handwriting factors). For what it's worth, the exercise is intended to be--as you note--very easy. The point is completing it efficiently, which can be affected by many different factors, including hand skills, anxiety, attention, fatigue, visual tracking, etc., in addition to pure motor speed.

I would not say the data support a poor short-term memory, but it is possible that he just compensates very well using other methods. I will note that it is quite unusual for exceptional musicians to have low working memory skills, though, as there is some association between rhythmic accuracy/precision and long short-term memory spans.

While it can be true that those on the autism spectrum test less consistently early in life, I would be cautious about interpreting his testing results with a view to diagnostic classifications such as those you list, based only on a few numbers. All of the diagnoses you mention are typically made using multiple measures and a high degree of clinical training and expertise. Asking the question is certainly reasonable, especially if you are seeing other signs in daily life that suggest this, but be open to a very different answer than the one you expected.

Finally, I am happy this young person has so many adults in his life who care about him, and who are trying to help him grow in every way! A child cannot be loved by too many people.

So here's a little more detail:

The correlation between cognitive and achievement instruments is typically between about .5 and .6, so as a ballpark, we would expect a composite of 152 to generate an achievement measure of about 130ish--and that happens to be almost exactly what his math measure is. In his case, there's a pretty marked difference between his verbal cognition and his nonverbal/quantitative cognitive measures, which suggests that he might have a nonverbal/mathematical preference (not that 132 is exactly low!). So while the 89th %ile score he has in reading is toward the periphery of the standard error range for his global cognition, it's pretty much a perfect match for his verbal score on the CogAT.

You may be wondering why I'm using the national percentiles and not the local percentiles, which look much more divergent. That's because the CogAT numbers you posted are almost certainly national numbers, so I'm just comparing apples to apples. It appears that your district is particularly high achieving, given that the average student is about a standard deviation above the national average, which may be clouding the picture when you consider your own child's profile.

In short: I would not worry at this moment about an unidentified learning disability. A tilted profile at this level of global strength is not necessarily a disability, and he is objectively ahead normatively in every assessed area (vs the general population, not your local pocket of brilliance). I think afterschooling in math is plenty. You are monitoring his progress and making decisions based on his overall development, health and happiness. That is all any of us can do. Take a deep breath, mama, you are doing fine!

Took 10 years, but Boaler's chickens have finally come home to roost.

https://stanforddaily.com/2024/04/1...-into-complaints-on-professor-jo-boaler/

https://drive.proton.me/#VCfOpReAcH9F

TimeAndDate website is one of several sites online to see an animation of today's solar eclipse.
https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2024-april-8