Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy New here! Question about AIG testing?

seaturtle, I agree that it is very important to trust your gut instincts when it comes to parenting. FWIW, here are my random thoughts:


I think that to compare performance to IQ it's important to have a fair comparison. For instance, if your ds was given a standard IQ test along with a standard achievement that are known to correlate, I would bw surprised to see achievement far outstrip IQ, and if it did, I would wonder if there was something that was perhaps inaccurate in the IQ test because in general, I don't think you'd expect to see a person wildly out-perform their ability.

OTOH, I don't think grades in a school classroom are a measure of achievement that can be easily compared to IQ. Grades in the classes my kids have been in have never been given out on a Bell Curve with Cs in the middle, and the material being taught in the typical early elementary classroom is almost always aimed at the middle of what kids are expected to be able to achieve (at best).



I would take another look at what the optometrist told you previously, and also think through why you had an optometrist eval (I'm guessing there was some concern that prompted the eval?) I realize behavioral optometrists and vision therapy can sound like complete hocus-pocus and a huge money sink, but I also have two children who have had very real vision challenges that have impacted their school work and which aren't solvable by simply putting a pair of eyeglasses on. My older dd has been through vision therapy and it helped her tremendously; my younger dd has less severe of an issue but she is also currently undergoing vision therapy... so that's my take on it, I'm a believer that it does help some types of vision challenges.

Re the reading grade - I don't see a lot of things in your post that would point to stealth dyslexia, but if you feel his grade doesn't reflect his ability in reading or see other signs that might point to a concern with reading (not wanting to read, or refusing to read aloud, or stumbling over words he should know) I would definitely recommend either looking through the info linked above on stealth dyslexia or seeking a private reading evaluation. Our dd8 is a high-acheiving student at school and she's reading above grade level (according to her school), but she has also recently been diagnosed with dyslexia. She isn't classically dyslexic, but she has a *huge* deficiency in one of the areas that impacts the ability to decode words. Most of her other reading eval scores are average or above average. She doesn't *look* dyslexic in part simply because she's a very driven child who seeks high grades and purposely hides anything that she thinks doesn't look perfect - and she's a bright child who can get away with lack of decoding ability to a certain extent by memorizing words and by seeking up meaning from context rather than individual words.


If you think the scores don't represent your ds and you really want to get him into the gifted program asap, I'd seek individual testing rather than relying on the group test results. You might be able to request this through the school (particularly if his teacher feels he's gifted), or if not, you can get the testing privately. This won't work everywhere, so I wouldn't spend money on it unless you feel that you'd be able to use the results and you're willing to risk that the results might come back showing he doesn't qualify for the gifted program. But - fwiw, our EG ds had taken the WISC prior to being given the CogAT to qualify for his school's gifted program. He was given the CogAT individually by a gifted program representative, with accommodations (he's 2e). He still only scored something like the 75th percentile. I was beyond shocked because that was hugely lower than his WISC scores. I later realized in reading online that it's not out of the realm of possibility (and happens more often than you'd think) that HG/EG/PG kiddos don't have comparable scores on the CogAT. The CogAT is a learned ability test, not an innate ability test - so exposure to some academics as well as answering questions within a bit of a square box can help scores. I remember asking ds about the test after he took it, and he told me about a few questions that he didn't know the answers to (the type of questions about things you would only know through exposure), and how he had deduced his answer - and he came up with great answers and really creative insightful reasoning... but they weren't the right answers. So a test like the CogAT *can* potentially trip up an outside-the-box high IQ kid.

Another thought - if there is any kind of visual challenge or reading issue, his scores on testing might be impacted by it.


Won't his teacher have access to his scores anyway - I thought it was a group test given at school? Here teachers would at least know which children have been id'd as "gifted".

Best wishes as you think through what to do next,

polarbear