Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment New here- Need help with WPPSI-III scores please

What happened to block design? It's usually the first test given, it seems odd it's not in there? Both my DDs seemed to not deal with the Wechsler picture based tests at all. Picture concepts & matrix reasoning were both my DDs' lowest (cognitive) scores on the WPPSI & the WISC, but both did very well on the adult Raven's, which is supposed to be testing the same skills as Matrix Reasoning but with line diagrams rather than weird cartoons.

To be perfectly honest I found the Raven's easier too. My 5yr old DD just received a work book for her birthday that had a matrix reasoning type exercise in it that neither DH and I could figure out. In the end we concluded with the workbook that our thinking was too complex about a simple question, we also had some trouble figuring out exactly what animal was represented by one of the cartoons (was it an axolotl or was it a lizard? edited to add - if the picture was a "lizard" it was the same as the other reptiles and the fish was different, if it's an axolotl then you need to know is the turtle a land or water creature? Arrgh! The answer could be that the fish is still different because the others are all amphibians, but is a ND 5yr old likely to be able to classify reptiles or know which creatures are amphibious? I have no idea!) and I wonder if that was where my girls went wrong with Picture Concepts and Matrix Reasoning.

Finally, my 5yr old did the WPPSI at 4yrs9mths and hit the hard ceiling of the picture completion test and that score was only a 17. If I had not seen her finish the whole test perfectly I would not have thought she could have done better when her score was 17, as I thought 19 was the hard ceiling for all tests. I called and confirmed with the psychologist that 17 was the highest possible score for a child of her age. I would be asking some more questions about how your DD went in the picture completion. I would not be surprised if she only missed the last question (it was the only one my DD even had to think about) or possibly even that she completed them all but there's just no head room for an almost 6 yr old to really show their stuff on that test.