Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment 3 year old eval

My son just had a full neuropsych evaluation because of some emotional intensity issues. He will be 4 in a couple weeks.

He was diagnosed with SPD (mostly auditory issues) and anxiety. His FSIQ was 121 with a SB visual spatial score over 130 (and his verbal VS subtest was a 17). We were pretty sure he was gifted, and honestly I was surprised his IQ wasn't higher. The psych said that he expected his score to increase with age, which surprised me. I know that he's young, but I also thought IQ was stable. He also said that FSIQ over 135 didn't really exist (not that it was rare but didn't really count). I really liked the psych, but they aren't gifted specialists (no such thing here). I've wondered as he gets older and we look to reevaluate if we shouldn't go somewhere else to get an accurate picture.

One thing I was really unclear on (and I'm waiting for clarification) was that SB Visual Spatial score was 132 but his Wide Range Assessment of Visual Motor Abilities visual spatial score was 96. That's a pretty big discrepancy!! I guess I don't understand what each of the tests measures and what would explain that difference.

I think I just talked around a lot of questions. Here they are:
1) How stable is an IQ at 3?
2) Is it reasonable to believe that his IQ will increase (to the 130 cutoff for our district's gifted program)?
3) Thoughts on the 135 IQ score cutoff
4) Thoughts on gifted evaluation with a specialist at some point in the future (age 6-8)
5) What would explain visual-spatial discrepancy?

Thanks.

Bump. Anyone with info on testing? Not my area of expertise, but generally IQ testing of the very young is not deemed all that reliable.

"He also said that FSIQ over 135 didn't really exist (not that it was rare but didn't really count)."

^^ This bothers me, though! Of course IQs over 135 exist, and there is a difference between people at different IQ levels. It's harder to accurately test at the high end of IQ tests, but the higher numbers do exist.

I agree with St pauli girl - results are quite unstable at 3 and in particular not every bright child is going to be equally focused, cooperative and easy to test. Our kids were tested by a gifted specialist team who generally won't test under 4 without special circumstances (younger sibling of gifted children with early school entrance deadlines looming for example). While I was talking to her about our two older girls, I asked when to test #3, and she said they don't test young if they can avoid it "Because you really have to put on a performance for the child to get them to perform for you"....

Hi there,

I am no expert at all on this (nor was the person who assessed my 3 year old), I should disclaim that first.

Congrats on some great scores. Your little one is clearly bright!

Like others have said its just the measurement on that day. With 3 year olds it can depend on their attention span, how they test, how they feel about the person giving the test etc.

I disagree that there are no children with over 135. Our little one was tested at 3 years 5 months and ceilinged 4 of the 5 subtests with an IQ in excess of 145 (greater than 99.9 percentile) so i am certain it does exist.

I have been told that it can change over time but I am not sure about getting better with age. My understanding was that it could go up or down for various different reasons.

You have no need to be disappointed as your little guy sounds like he is done wonderfully

Wow. Um...