Hi all
New here and feel this is a 'safe' place for me to share and seek advice as an immigrant in NZ and finding it hard to discuss any of this with anyone and have no family on hand.
The test results are in so I've come to the experts seeking advice. These are for a boy who turned 8 in November and has been grade accelerated by a year (after 6 months in school). He is a lovely boy in our company and generally we don't have any discipline problems with him. He is very sensitive and is just beginning to learn to control his emotions, just begining to watch movies that he hasn't first read the book to and about got a handle on his frustrations. We decided to test after his IEP at the end of term highlighted his inability to pick up on social cues, his lack of respect for personal space and his poor motor skills.
We also became aware during his birthday party and a few playdates through the holidays that his 'friends' seem to constantly put him down. If he came up with an idea it was very quickly rubbished (even though we could see the validity) and the others would not give him an inch in any discussions. We suspect this may be an age dominance thing but not sure. He has been in a class with other very bright kids for the past two years, this year they will get split up more but he will still be with some of them.
Anyway his results:
Wisc IV
VCI - 138
SIM 17
VOC 16
COM 16
PRI - 121
BD 13
PC 15
MR 12
WMI - 132
DS 17
LNS 14
PSI - 97
CO 7
SS 12
Comment on the report was "his processing speed abilities are in the average range and significantly lower than his other cognitive abilities. This is due to his slower fine motor skills rather than his inability to process information quickly and correctly."
His achievement test was also quite revealing with two major discrepancies - test was WIAT-II.
Word reading 132 98 percentile
Reading comp 126 96
Psuedoword decoding 129 97
Spelling 129 97
Written expression 93 32Numerical operations 104 61 Maths reasoning 125 95
Comment made was "His written expression skills are well below his other literacy skills and verbal cognitive skills. The mismatch appears to be due to his difficulty in expressing his thoughts and ideas to paper. He appears to be showing symptoms of dysgraphia. He would benefit from structured written expression tuition". What is written expression tuition?
He also had a self concept test - Piers-Harris 2 and the results were a bit of a worry to us as we thought we had a fairly happy wee boy! Especially so for the last 6 weeks (school hols)
Most of this test was average but his percentiles for the following were 'low average'
Popularity 18 percentile
Happiness and satisfaction 24
Total score (overall self-concept) 27
comment made "he appears to feel more negative than many of his peers about his body and physical attributes and popularity. He seems to feel that he is not accepted or included by his peers as he wishes and hence this appears to make him feel unhappy and unsatisfied generally".
My questions are:
Where does he sit in the 'gifted range' His report basically says score of 130 and above is gifted but I guess I'm trying to gauge is he MG, HG etc. mostly so I have an idea of what if anything more we need to advocate for at school and also to get some idea of where we will find his 'true' peers. Also with the huge discrepancy in his PSI - is there anything we can do to help with this, given the comment re motor skills will it simply improve with time or do we need to do something specific.
If you're still with me thanks and I really appreciate any thoughts on my wee treasure.
Also if there is anyone out there in Perth WA that has BTDT and can share any experiences with me I would be grateful as we are thinking of moving there later this year and I'm getting a bit concerned about schooling options now I've started looking into it.
Jedsmum. x
