My dd, 8, did the NWEA MAP testing in early spring of 2nd grade and she scored in the 99th percentile in Reading and Language Usage with lexile score (text) in the 1050-1150 range. My husband and I have always known she was a bright child as did all of her teachers yet we were frustrated by the lack of enrichment opportunities and school work at her level. We were relieved to have something tangible - finally! - to help guide us in how to advocate for her needs.

We decided also to have cognitive testing done for her to provide further guidance. This was yesterday and we are just stymied by her scores which came out in the low-average to gifted range. She had a very wide range of composite scores ranging from a composite score of 88 in Processing Speed to the upper end of the 120s in Perceptual Reasoning. In Block Design, she scored an 11 when timed, and without timing, it was 19. Her verbal scores were actually a relative weakness compared to her scores on the perceptual and working memory subtests.

The examiner was baffled by the range of the scores as well as other behaviours - some attentional quirks yet very focused, giving responses considerable thought before deciding they were too hard instead of just saying "I don't know", very slow processing speed and her perfectionism showing up during some of the testing (especially verbal subtests) and yet not in others (perceptual reasoning). Perfectionism is a hallmark of my dd's personality as has her need to do things in her own time. So it's never been a surprise to us that every one of her report cards has the comment "needs more time to complete work."

Anyway, my question is...how can the huge discrepancy between the MAP scores - which shows language as a significant strength and math as a relative weakness - and the new WISC-IV scores which shows the opposite, be explained?

I'm wondering if having the one-on-one interaction with the examiner (with whom she got along quite well) actually resulted in lower scores because of her perfectionism/unwillingness to take risks where there's room for different interpretations. MAP testing is done with the computer and it's all multiple-choice. Much less room for error and risk-taking there.

We'll have the full report in a couple of weeks time so hopefully the examiner - who is considerably experienced in evaulating gifted children - will be able to shed some light on this too.

Thank you!


Last edited by Mombot; 08/31/08 07:32 AM.