Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Tested Gifted but average in academics....

When DD was 5 in Kindergarten we had her evaluated. She had such emotional issues with school, cried day and night not wanting to go, acting out severely at home. She was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder. At the same time her IQ was tested and she tested with a 131, which was explained to us as highly gifted. We have struggled along, she is now in 2nd grade. But finally happy with school. (Hated first grade nearly as much as Kindergarten) She is settling in much better, doesn't seem to obsess and worry over every little thing going on around her. But there is one thing that always stays the same...she is middle of the road in academics. Average reading level, average math. In fact she just took the NWEA test and tested perfectly average. I don't get it...Did I miss something? She has been in counseling for the anxiety for a year and a half, started OT for sensory issues this past summer, which has been super helpful. She is so bright and thinks things that you wouldn't typically think an almost 7 year old would think, so shy doesn't she excel in academics? I have tried to reach out to school personnel but they don't see anything but average. And I just know there is more there, than average. I am ready to throw in the towel, maybe they got her IQ test all wrong and she really is just average..(which is fine, she's a great kid who is very kind and athletic) I just wish we had some guidance, maybe I am doing something wrong... Any suggestions? Anyone deal with a similar situation? Is the anxiety really getting in the way of her learning and excelling? So frustrated, I just want the best for her and for her to reach her potential.

Gifted girls are adept at hiding their abilities. They adapt to their surroundings in order to try to fit in. So if your DD is testing perfectly average, it sounds like she has done a perfect job of blending in. And since perfectionism is another trait of gifted children, I wouldn't be surprised to learn your DD had figured out what score she needed to be perfectly average, and missed just enough answers on purpose.

We caught my own DD7 doing this. She went to pre-K already reading picture books, and printing with penmanship I could only dream of. That pre-K teacher celebrated her abilities, and she got the chance to shine... reading aloud to the class, for example. Then came K. A few weeks in, she came home with a mess of a paper, and tried telling us she had forgotten how to write the letter M. Needless to say, we weren't buying it.

Emotional issues, check. Not wanting to go to school, check. Acting out at home, check. In our case, we recognized the problem immediately, and after advocacy failed to yield tolerable results, we yanked her out and homeschooled her.

As an FYI, the term "highly gifted" is usually reserved for those with an IQ 145+. The range 130-144 is considered "moderately gifted." This is also the range my DD tested into.

FWIW, one of my children tested gifted when she was 5 (IQ), performed average in school, and later on when re-tested on IQ (twice) had IQ scores that were lower and more in line with her performance in school. I am not saying that's what's up with your dd at all - just throwing out there the possibility that on occasion IQ tests in really young kids may be inflated or unreliable. *HIGHLY* unlikely, but many years later down the road, I do believe that for our average-performing dd, the first "gifted" IQ score was the anomaly, not her true IQ.

OTOH, having an EG and HG kiddo also - I can also vouch that just because a child has a high IQ that is no guarantee they are going to be driven to uber-achieve so I wouldn't automatically think average classroom performance means that a child isn't intellectually gifted. It could mean lack of motivation, or it could mean something else. Was there any indication of 2e on your dd's original IQ test? Or possibility that undiagnosed LDs might have been driving her anxiety in the classroom? I'm only asking that because my 2 2e kiddos had tremendous anxiety around school when they were in K-2 grade, yet it wasn't obvious to us that it correlated to specific tasks they had to perform at school until we had neuropsych testing. My ds had IQ testing for a gifted program at 5, and there was a huge red flag in his IQ test, but the evaluator put it off to his being a gifted perfectionist so we never thought twice about it... then we sent him off to school expecting him to excel and it just never happened... until he was re-evaluated in 2nd grade and the neuropsych picked up on what was really going on. Once he had accommodations in place, he started performing at the level we'd expected him to based on his IQ.

Dude, fwiw, how the term "highly" is defined depends on who's using it I've heard some neuropsychs refers to 130+ as HG, our neuropsych refers to 135+ as HG, our school district usually in most years reforest to 140+ as HG (each of those on the WISC-IV).

polarbear

Yes... sigh... anxiety-ridden kids are so prone to being chameleons. I've mentioned in previous posts about how, once my DD realized she was the only one in preschool who could read and write, she suddenly "forgot" how. She and I both have been slayed by the perfectionism that Dude mentions.

What test was it (i.e. WISC-IV) that gave you her IQ score? FWIW, I don't think false high scores are possible. Many issues can interfere with testing and create false lows, but not false high.

Funny I thought that 130 was where gifted started (as in MG, not HG). It's true that there are different definitions though.

This becomes a much bigger topic, but I have to say that I don't agree with this. Especially in young children, exposure makes a big difference on IQ tests. Kids who have enriched environments are much more likely to test highly on tests of vocabulary, knowledge of social norms and general knowledge, puzzles, etc. All of these make up parts of common well regarded IQ tests such as the WISC. It doesn't require "hot housing" per se with the intent of inflating scores. Likewise, scores can be depressed by un-enriched environments.

I believe that is why adoption studies show that adoptees' IQ scores are more similar to those of their adoptive parents in childhood and regress or inflate to be more in line with those of their biological parents the older they get.

All of this is not to say that the IQ scores are necessarily wrong in the OP's instance. Like someone else mentioned, there could be a dual exceptionality such as a learning disability at play.

Ok... interesting point... so the kids who score higher may be those who have had exposure to "acquired knowledge" components. They would score higher than those without the exposure, for sure, but if you separated the acquired knowledge portions from the aptitude portions, then you could isolate the areas in which exposure made a difference. The aptitude portions (forgive my clumsy, non-psychologist terminology, lol) wouldn't be false high scores.

So the question is, just what is IQ? The old adage of "you can't study for an IQ test" either isn't valid, or the WISC isn't a true "IQ" test.

Am I wrong? This is an area I'm not well versed in.

IQ is just a score on a test relative to the "norming" population. Then IQ is correlated to other things in longitudinal studies like getting a graduate degree.

When they norm a test, they tend to make sure that the group doesn't have prior exposure.

So, with no prior exposure a kid can easily make a mistake here and there from not understanding. Another question here and there can be lost to impulsivity. It can also take a bit to get some kind of solution heuristic.

At a base level familiarity and some training with the sub-test types can reduce some of those errors and thus artifically bump scores. Some verbal aspectds depend on vocabulary richness which is teachable as is a certain amount of numerical reasoning.

Meta-skills like reviewing your work, pre-training in specific solution heuristics, etc. could improve scores.

I imagine there is a limit to the bump prep could give, my gut says maybe 10-15 pts. It would likely level out if there was future testing.

It isn't valid. The publishers are extremely careful about letting too much information get out about the test, for this reason. What's really true is that you *shouldn't* study (specifically) for an IQ test because this will invalidate it. Practice certainly can make a difference, and my guess is that this is likely to be especially true for young children because there hasn't been time for so much divergence between the specific tasks of an IQ test and the tasks one encounters in every day life. It's not just the obviously "knowledge" based components, either, I bet. For example, I'd wager quite a lot that a few minutes a day spent practising digits forward and digits backward, tests on which full details are easily available, would improve one's score dramatically over a few weeks. (In fact, given that I'm now never going to take an IQ test, I have wondered more than once about trying the experiment.)

ETA: Weirdly, you hear the same thing about problem-based maths competitions: "you can't study for them". Of course you can, and if you want to do well, you should!

This is another thing that I wished I had realized at the time.

Although I really wasn't that into the math competitions.

I was more into History Day, even though I was inherently stronger in the maths/sciences.

LOL now you've got me wondering as well. Too funny. Although I don't think I want to take any more either... ;p