Hi, my son just turned 5. We just had our meeting for transition to K today and after a battle I finally got them to schedule my son for an IQ test. We go back in 2 weeks and I want to make sure I am prepared and everything is as it should be.
Today they did what they called a short IQ test, I guess standard for all kids going into K? It took maybe 20 minutes and seemed pretty simple. The administrator said after "Your son was amazing, either he is very bright or a very good guesser." This kinda bothered me because the fact that I've been saying he is unusually gifted at academics for years should be the first clue he wasn't just guessing. The test also seemed very basic, letters, numbers, colors. There were some questions like leaf is to tree as petal is to ? He seemed to really enjoy those as I heard all about them on the car ride home. They said I will have the results for this mini test soon.
My son is currently diagnosed with ASD (basically mild asperger's) and we are privately looking at whether that label is still accurate and whether ADHD better describes him now... or both. He is very hyper, impulsive, unfocused, and distracted, to the point where it takes us 40 minutes to get out of the house to go places (even those he really wants to go to). He is on Prozac for anxiety. His behavior at school is a mess.
I feel that any test that adds to our understanding of him and what is going on is very valuable and I finally convinced them to do it. The IU has been putting me off for 2 years saying that IQ wasn't a factor in his behavior and it would be something we could look into later.
I met the lady who will administer the test. She seems very nice and was calm with my son, which is great. She said there will be a 1 hour IQ test, the wispy it sounded like she said and a 1 hour achievement test. Since the school is only 5 minutes away I decided to break it up into 2 sessions.
Is there anything else I should be requesting? Does all of that sound standard? My sons current preK teacher is concerned about dyslexia, will that test pick up on that? Is there anything I need to teach him about taking tests? Today I saw the instructor ask him to touch the picture of the employees. He said "employees?" She said, "yeah, I know that's a big word." He touched a picture of people, but the wrong one. Later I asked him if he knew what an employee was. He said employees are people who do what you tell them to and they make things. I feel like he would have done much better if he had been able to answer verbally or if conversation had been encouraged rather than a simple point to the answer style. Will the real test also be a lot of the pointing stuff?
I have to admit that I waited 4 years to get this testing done (by 12 months my son was very different from the typical children and I had no idea what was going on) and now that we are finally ready to get our answers I'm actually kind of scared. I'm not worried about a high or low score, I just want an accurate score and I'm worried about him testing below where he should due to his social and behavioral issues. I don't want the test to say he is smart, I want it to help us with understanding him. So I'm very concerned about getting an accurate result.
I know I can't be there for the IQ test, but I'm hoping I can for the academic testing. That will give me a chance to let the tester know if he just isn't trying. Tonight he wanted some math questions during dinner so I asked 224 plus 224. He immediately said 424. I said,"I think you forgot to do something". He thought a moment and said 448. He often does that, answers without thinking it through and during testing they won't know he is just blurting out something and not thinking.
If he does do poorly on the test or is uncooperative, how long do we have to wait to test again? I'm still not sure I trust an employee of the public school system to do a good job at this, but I am happy they will be doing it for free. If I feel the results do not represent my son at all I would like to get him retested privately as soon as it's ok to do so.
I'm probably not going to sleep for the next two weeks. Between the IQ testing and him taking the ADOS again I've got way too much to worry about! He just finished his BOT 2 testing through his private OT, he got 5.7 (age equivalents, not raw scores) on fine motor precision, 7.4 on fine motor integration, around 6.5 on the third subtest (forget what it was, included making dots on circles and stringing beads), and today he did one with ball skills and scored below age 4, but it's not all scored yet. So on the BOT 2 alone his age ranges were from 3-7. I'm happy to finally be moving forward on getting some answers, hopefully all of this will really benefit my son.
And sorry if this was rambly, I'm having a rambly sort of week.
