Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Numbers not matching the kid???

Wolf just did his Wisc yesterday. It took 2 hours. The overall is 132 and the GAI is 136 (from memory I don't have the paper in my hand yet). Now from what I understand this falls in the moderately gifted range and kids like these might benefit from some differentiated work or possibly a grade skip.

Now here's my concern. Wolf is working a minimum of two years above his age all the way up through 8th grade level. He is not pushed and is working at around ability level in all subjects (handwriting is still at age level). We're very seriously considering another skip before placing him in mainstream school (if that happens) just so he won't be bored and that still wouldn't put him at a level that would challenge him. I know kids in the local GATE program and I believe their cut off is 130. Those kids are NOTHING like Wolf. I'm talking a totally different animal. None of them would take history books home over the summer for fun.

So, yes, they are good scores, but from what I understand of the scores they don't fit my child's abilities or personality. What could cause this? The tester says he was focused and working hard the whole time they were together. He isn't suffering from summertime brain either.

He's taking the WIAT today. She said she thought he might do better on that.

It was a lot of money out of pocket that we can barely afford and now I'm wondering if it was worth it just to get numbers that don't seem to match him. She says she has experience working with gifted kids, but most of her clients are on the other end of the spectrum. She's the only tester I could find anywhere near us and that was after searching for a long time.

I'm horribly confused at this point. I'm wondering if it's just me thinking he's amazing because I'm his mom, but I'm reminding myself that EVERY teacher he has had has told me they've never worked with a kid like him before (well except one boy who designed ant habitats for a science museum when he was in high school). I'm worrying if we should just mainstream him, maybe I'm pushing him and don't mean to? But he's always the one flying ahead and I'm the one trying to slow him down a little. This is what I was afraid of before the testing, that the numbers wouldn't fit him.

I don't have much to offer in terms of why the scores might not match the child, but I have one child who sounds a lot like what you are describing and who had very similar WISC-IV composite scores to that at seven. She did have a lot of scatter within indices, though, such as an 8 and a 19+ in the same index. Did the tester mention whether his scores were consistently around the same spot or if he was uneven? I understand that kids with really high highs that are pulled down by other much lower scores might be more gifted than the composite # indicates.

FWIW, mine will be 14 in about two months and entering 10th grade. I, too, have had many, many teachers and others tell me that she is the most gifted kid they've ever worked with and she, too, stands out as tremendously different than MG kids.

I've been comfortable accelerating her more than her IQ numbers might indicate for two reasons: she fits better educationally and socially with this older group, and our local GT programming serves about 20% of the kids so even a 98th-99th percentile composite kid is fairly different from a kid who hit the 95th in one area once after test prep, repeat testing, etc.

I haven't seen the full write up yet so I don't have any more specifics. I'll post them when I get them.

Mainly right now I'm doubting my mom instincts. I don't want to be the mom who thinks my kids is brilliant when he is simply smart, but i deal with him every day and I KNOW he's not just smart. It's such a dichotomy between the number and the reality that I'm having trouble processing it, I suppose.

Wyldcat: It seems to me that the observed disparity is between ability (the IQ score) and achievement (what he's able to do in school).

Ability is just one component of achievement, with some others being opportunity and interest. So if your child has had a multitude of good opportunities to use his abilities, and his interest has been engaged all along, then it would logically follow that he'd be achieving at a higher level than others within his ability range.

My DD7 is in the same IQ neighborhood as Wolf, and she faces challenges with the opportunities she's offered at school, which has in turn caused her interest to lag. Nevertheless, she spent last year doing mostly work that was two years beyond her grade level.


I don't think there's any "might" about it. You're still talking about being 2SDs above the mean, and qualified for Mensa. Keeping this kid at grade level is inappropriate.

While I do think this is true and I also think that my kiddo whom I referenced above has unusual direction that causes higher achievement in her area of passion, I do also think that there are times when a child is just more or less gifted than the IQ numbers tell. It isn't a perfect tool, just the best we have.

I also don't think that, if wyldcat is dealing with a situation similar to ours, the "more gifted" look is solely due to high achievement. In our instance, part of what makes our dd appear more HG+ than MG is her depth and abstractions. Even as a young elementary student, she was writing poetry that had teachers think she had forged it or had me write it for her, for instance. She went on to write more in class which laid that concern to rest, but she was able to emulate the writing styles of poets she liked so well that I had teachers tell me that they thought she was copying down poems of authors such as Langston Hughes or Sara Teasdale that they had not yet read not just intentionally writing in their style.

That type of stuff isn't just the kiddo reading or doing math at a high level, it is more that leans toward the kid just being something "more" than MG IQ scores would suggest. For a long time, I was convinced that my dd was actually MG and only stood out b/c our GT id process is so screwed up that she was being compared to average kids. I've come to realize that, while a lot of these other kids really don't hit the gifted point per psychometric standards, they are probably more capable than I've given them credit for, which also inches dd further along the spectrum of intelligence than I've given her credit for.

At some point, I guess that you just need to take the person you have and run with it and not worry so much about the numbers unless you need them for admission to a program like DYS or something else.

That's mainly why were were getting the testing done, applying to DYS. Pretty much everyone who knows him thought he'd be a shoe in. That's one reason why I'm so confused with the results so far.

Thank you everyone for your input. It's reassuring to read that kids could have one IQ score when tested, but preform at a higher number.

And it's not that he does math really well or anything like that. He just thinks SO differently and is SO intense and focused on whatever his goal is. And the questions! I'm smart, pretty much always the smartest kid in the honors classes when I was in school, but he blows me away with no contest.

Hugs! We were considering retesting dd recently ourselves but couldn't find a time that worked reasonably well with the one psych we could afford and, honestly, I do wonder if we wouldn't have wound up in the same spot you're finding yourself in with numbers that still don't match the kid. Her prior testing was done with a doctoral student and wouldn't work for anything she might want to use it for (no licensed psych siggie, etc.) other than it did the trick with the schools early on at least.

I like to remember that Richard Feynman reportedly achieved a whopping IQ score of 125. It's obvious that IQ tests measure some aspects of behavior related to intelligence, but they don't capture everything.

Your son's what, seven turning eight, and working at an eighth grade level based on self-motivation? I think that the numbers you've gotten are probably an underestimate. Bright but motivated children just don't usually achieve that way, although I guess the recent post by Bostonian about prodigies shows that I shouldn't assume very much.

I'm sorry you didn't get the results yet that you expected, but I wouldn't give up on DYS at all. I would bet there are plenty of DYS admittees with far lesser achievement at the same age, and a fair number with a similar profile that were admitted.

I like to think of the IQ score like a measurement of horse power in the engine. The direction, speed, control and distance is determined by the driver, which these tests don't properly measure. Richard Feynman is clearly a better driver than most of us.

I think in the gifted literature this critical element is called entelechy--passion, motivation, drive.

I know... (sigh). Same here. (Kind of).

Our pediatrician warned us against testing both kids, saying that their behavioural issues (attention & anxiety) would interfere with the accuracy of the test scores, but we disregarded her advice and had DS8 (then 7) tested.

The psychologist was unable to calculate his IQ, because the difference between his high and low scores was "consistent with only 7% of the population, and such that an overall score could not be calculated" ...meanwhile she diagnosed him with ADHD combined type and Expressive and Receptive Language Disorder, with "solidly average" cognitive skills.

Meanwhile, she said that he cooperated for about :45 out of each 2 hour session (there were three in total). His academic skills were "age and grade appropriate" even though he tests in the 0.5th percentile for receptive language and the 12th for expressive, and he's in language immersion in school (so he's not even learning English, yet he reads it as well as kids who are learning it in school and who do not have language processing disorders). ...and yet his cognition is "average."

With a score of 0.5th percentile for receptive processing, how is it that he can even communicate at all, let alone read and write in two languages? But whatever... he's "average." I know he's not at Wolf's level, but he's definitely not just average, either.

Btw - I don't doubt the processing scores: His speech is very odd. He mispronounces words, forgets vocabulary, confuses one word for another, etc. His speech is consistent with the language processing disorder. I even doubt the ADHD diagnosis (as does the pediatrician), but I don't doubt the language diagnosis.

Meanwhile at home he reads above grade level (2-3 grades above) material and does above grade level math (for fun! he asks me to give him math to do). He was the first kid in his grade who could play chess (he was 6) and was praised by a math camp instructor as having an "excellent, strategic math mind." As far as genetics go, I (his mom) was in Mensa (IQ 153) and his sister is in the school's gifted math program. I could go on and on, but you get the drift. Bottom line - my DS's test results don't match him either.

Our psychologist has experience with gifted kids, but not 2e. She told us to take his results with a grain of salt and that they "do not represent DS's full potential."

Excellent. There goes our one time ("per lifetime per child") partial coverage + $500. Yippee.

No, Wyldkat, you're not over-estimating Wolf's ability - you know your child. Sometimes test results just don't reflect what is actually going on.