I am hoping someone can help me interpret my second grader's scores on various tests, as she has some huge strengths and unusual weaknesses and I am trying to figure out the next steps. I apologize in advance for the lenghty post.
She took the Naglieri and CogAT at school and scored lower than we expected, particularly on the NNAT:
CogAT Verbal 115
CogAT Quantitative 127
CogAT Nonverbal 115
CogAT Composite 121
Naglieri 93
We took her for private WISC-IV testing at a teacher's advice and got these scores:
VC 155
Similarities 19
Vocabulary 19
Comprehension 19
PR 121
Block Design 11
Picture Concepts 16
Matrix Reasoning 13
WM 123
Digit Span 13
Letter-Num Seq 15
PS 109
Coding 11
Symbol Search 12
Full Scale IQ 136
The psychologist testing said she has never tested a child who scored as highly on the verbal sections and indicated she could have gone even further on those. However, she also said that she has some form of a learning disability where she should qualify for extra time and take-home testing given her low scores on everything timed. Additionally, she indicated that anything truly nonverbal was a big struggle, but as soon as a verbal element was introduced (such as with picture concepts) she did very well. The psychologist was quite rushed and did not explain anything further except to recommend $1000 worth of additional testing (achievement and Stanford Binet).
I had told the psychologist in advance of two quirks I have long noticed with my daughter. One is that despite being an avid reader and careful worker, she frequently misspells words by transposing letters (such as "fram" instead of "farm" or "Calra" instead of "Clara" - it's usually a vowel and consonant, often an a). She also is slow with basic addition and subtraction facts even though she breezes through mathematical concepts. Her grades are very good but then again her classwork isn't all that hard yet; the psychologist thinks she must be able to compensate even beyond what we are aware of as she is highly motivated to succeed. My daughter described to the psychologist the feeling of knowing an answer in her head but struggling to get it onto the paper. The psychologist felt that even with her 155 VC she may not be accepted into our highly competitive GT program due to the variance of scores (although she has the strong backing of her teacher to get in).
I am most concerned about what might be causing her to struggle and whether these kids of glitches ring a bell with anyone here. Also I would like to know if anyone has recommendations for the best next step for us; I am not sure the kind of testing being recommended is going to get us much closer to the root of the issue.
Finally, I just learned about the concept of extended norms from this BB. I get the sense that our psychologist did not test these, since she was very rushed (late and overscheduled) and told me that she could have gone higher. Is this something I should be looking into for the VC portion? Would we have to redo the whole test to do so?
Thank you for any help!
Last edited by June; 02/10/10 09:49 PM.
