Another question: Is it possible that my son is just mildly gifted child but managed to be tested PG? Can there be a mistake or is there a flynn effect and that children are getting higher and higher scores on the WISC IV? If tested PG, what kind of percentile are we looking at? 99.999... or something else? One in a ____ (thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand, million?). PG probably means very bright, so how often does a gifted education teacher meet with a PG student? One a year, or one every decade or a few a year?
An expert, which I'm not, will be along shortly, but I reckon:
- Really mildly gifted: Not likely. WISCIV test scores are not as stable as people sometimes think, but at the very least, your DS has on one occasion demonstrated the ability to answer extremely well. Suppose he were retested and tested 20 points lower (it does happen). What would that tell you? It wouldn't tell you he'd guessed the first time round - it would tell you that for some reason his performance was uneven. You'd still have these issues.
- Mistake: not likely, given that he has similarly high scores in several indices. If you have the raw scores I'm sure someone will check the calculation for you!
- Flynn effect: the Flynn effect is real, but the WISCIV is a current test, so you don't need to worry about the Flynn effect here. (In fact the Flynn effect may not apply to the upper tail of the curve in the same way that it applies to the middle, anyway; I remember it being suggested that it didn't, but I don't know what the state of knowledge is.)
- The WISCIV is based on a standard deviation of 15, so your DS is more than 3.5 DSs above the mean. Based on a normal curve that means at least that he's above the 99.9th percentile; but in fact, he's higher than that and the IQ distribution is fat-tailed (there are many more children with very high IQ scores than would be predicted from the normal curve - but it's still very rare, don't get me wrong!) so I don't know exactly. Anyway, "1 in 1000" is a conservative estimate I guess. You certainly can't assume that a teacher, even a gifted teacher, has ever known a child at that level well. (Let alone one at that level who also has AS!)
If you haven't already found Hoagies you may find it useful, e.g.
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/highly_profoundly.htm
