WE'RE IN EUROPE. Sorry. I should start off with that, every time I guess. Someone please tell me how to add a location!
So, hoagies is no help here.
The first tester is the one that has been doing the testing for the state's gifted program ever since its inception (about a decade), has been affiliated with a prestigious university and and had then founded a private testing institute, has over thirty publications in the field and her parenting handbook is one of the go to's in the country. On the country's gifted boards, she is always the one recommended.
The result does sound high, at the time I was floored myself. The tester told me at the time that tests are incomplete snapshots at best and if the result made me uncomfortable, to take ten points off, might be just as accurate. That the test had just been renormed with extended norms, and she had scored it twice, once with the old norms and once with the extended norms, and with the old norms he'd ceilinged at 147.
Honestly, anything around the 145 mark would sound just okay to me. I am not invested in calling my child PG, but I am pretty sure that 115 is ridiculous, and so is talking about all that "practice" that the school psych freely admitted he thought his parents were pushing on him. Well not me, I said, I promise you I don't have the time, sometimes I barely remember to ask whether he did his homework.
I did phone the first tester, got her voicemail and asked her to call me back but she hasn't yet.
I know the precise tests, the CFT (Culture Fair Test) the only one being international, the other tests are local so few here would be familiar with them. Anyway, I have no quibbles with the achievement test that said that at the beginning of third grade, he scored at the 98% percentile at an end of year test. Sounds about right to me, that's what I see, academically he should be in fourth, period.
I didn't jump at the time (though I probably should have) at his being all taken aback when I mentioned he was entered early "but that means one should be extra careful about a second acceleration!"
Should have mentioned that if he wanted to treat DS as the second grader he should be, he should have scored that grade normed ability test test that he scored in the 95th percentile on as a hypothetical fourth grader for second grade, not for third, because then that would have come out above the 99th percentile. I felt it would sound like whining "but I want him to be above the gifted line!" at the time, because it's after all only a few weeks. I realize now that it is completely unprofessional of him not to notice that he was too young for grade even so.
I have no idea how much experience that tester has with gifties. The usual, I expect, few and far between, it's certainly not his specialty, I am sure he mostly deals with the other end of the spectrum.
Yes, all the data but that one say "gifted", if maybe not highly gifted.
Forgot to mention that he did come up with yet another reason: the Culture Fair Test being language free and thus showing "basal intelligence", the other tests being language heavy and thus very much skewed towards "acquired knowledge" and practice.
He did admit that 115 fit none of his other observations either, that he'd personally veer closer towards 130 in his estimate, clearly bright, but that this showed how he needed to work on his routine jobs and his focus and blah blah blah. Wonder how he thought this kid with no tolerance for practice and no focus could hothouse himself into achievement scores above the 98th percentile for the end of the year he was accelerated in. Let alone above the 99th percentile on the WISC derivation (called adaptive intelligence diagnosticum, developed by the university of Vienna, exists in a number of European languages, and uses the subtests of the WISC, but moves faster towards the harder questions to avoid testing fatigue with presumably highly intelligent kids). Ah, I forget, that one was the incompetent and/or unethical tester.
Yes, and that babbling about how gifted might be defined as what a test measured, but might also be defined as how well you cope with the requirements your environment, school or workplace, demands of you...odd.
But frankly, the part that weirded me out most was the recommendations. Have him tutor others to gain social acceptance. Have him try to emulate the two oldest girls in class who are pulling down the perfect As by striving to write as well as them. Have him work on task initiation, on organizing his stuff. He started telling me how in the workplace, sometimes you need to do the routine jobs as well not just the interesting ones...he went on so that I had to interrupt him and tell him that I had a job as well and knew about the requirements of the workplace, and knew exactly what he'd struggle with, I am his mom you know, I'm not that different, and it was actually all we were working on, executive function morning and night. And why he needed to work on that with academics he'd obviously, per his achievement test results, surpassed long ago. "Because you should not push him any further,he will just move further away from his classmates, which will make social acceptance harder!"
He did proceed, at a later point, to talk again, how I knew as a housewife that routine jobs have to be done.
I sometimes felt as if we were on two different sides of a wall, talking at the bricks.
Last edited by Tigerle; 12/11/14 12:18 PM.
