OK, jumping back in here. I haven't read Ruf's book, so I can't comment there. But I did check out her levels online when we started to have problems with dd's school. I already mentioned how my dd fits on her scales. I was very surprised when her IQ and achievement scores came back as high as they did, in part because I feel level 3/level 4 describes my dd.
She met all her milestones early, but not at those jaw-dropping ages that are in level 5. She had an exceptional vocabulary with impeccable pronunciation at a an early age, but didn't start to read until 3.5. That's when she taught herself to sound out words. But her reading didn't take off for awhile because she refused to just memorize sight words like: the, there, was, said. (on the Ruf scales she got a 'no' for memorizing books and having early sight words � and there's two of these on the list for level 4) She would insist on sounding them out every time and ultimately got discourage. But by age 6 she was reading Harry Potter. Her learning in math is amazing. But she never liked puzzles or shape sorters (there's two on the list she got a 'no' for) and hates calculating.
For me, I see profoundly gifted (and level 5) as a term I would use to describe those remarkable kids who can do lighting fast calculations in their head, are reading chapter books at 2-3 and head off to college by the time they hit 10. None of this is my daughter. In fact, there are people that have known her her whole life who would be surprised to find out how well she scored.
Where my daughter's strength lies is her creative problem solving skills. I think it is one of the reasons she does so well in testing (thus my comment before about her being a good tester). The psychologist showed us the results of her achievement test and said how impressed she was in dd's approach to solving problems. One of the questions asked dd (age 6 at the time) to add something like 1/3 + 2/5. Well, dd hadn't learned to add fractions with different denominators yet. In fact, her whole knowledge of fractions was based mostly on our cooking/baking together a lot. Yet she figured out the answer by drawing two circles and dividing them each and shading them for the right fraction. Then the tester told us, after looking at it for a little, she took the circle that was divided into thirds and started drawing lines to divide each third part into fifth, and then filled in the number of fifth that she had from the other circle, and counted up the total number of shaded 15th. Without even knowing anything about common denominators, she was able to figure out how to solve the problem. Now that was jaw-dropping for me. But not something you'd find on Ruf's levels. So while I'm sure that her levels can be very helpful in figuring out where a child falls in the whole gifted spectrum, it doesn't always match up with the IQ testing.
And in answer to your question, incogneato, she attends public school and so far it's been an uphill battle and a very frustrating waste of time. Private school is not an option, and I'm not brave enough to homeschool, so for now we're still trying to work with the school.
