Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment WPPSI-IV Renorming Question

My 4 year old son participated in the WPPSI-IV re-norming and I am somewhat perplexed by the results. He was chosen because of his advanced milestones (reading and using our computer independently at 20 months) and the fact that he is working at a 2nd to 3rd grade level academically and is still in preschool. He has taught himself most of these things on his own because of an obsession with reading and math. Well the scores came back and his overall score was 129 which is one point below the gifted level. Most subareas were in the mid 120s with Working Memory being being 150 and Processing speed being 106. It is silly because my son is obviously gifted so does the fact that he scored so low show that he is 2e? Or is this not a good indicator of giftedness at such a young age? The letter we received in the mail did say that overall the re-norming scores came in lower than expected. I'm wondering if this could be due to changes that were made to the test for re-norming. This is our first experience with testing and I'm just trying to figure our little guy out. Thanks.

I rarely post on here, but I just had to respond to your post. I just got the scores from my two children who participated in the same study. Both scores were much lower than I expected, with my now 6 year old's scores being almost absurdly low (he didn't test in the gifted range either). Similarly to your son, he's shown extremely advanced abilities from a young age (he taught himself to read at 2 years old, currently reads around a 6th grade level, is working several years ahead in math, etc). It was our first experience with testing too. The only thing I can think is that 1) the test took over 3 hours for him to complete (the tester ran out of questions to ask him on every sub-test) and 2) he's a relatively shy child who takes a while to warm up in new situations, so maybe those things played a role? I'm at a bit of a loss myself, but I just wanted to let you know that you weren't alone.

Did you see the note at the bottom of the page that many of the scores were lower than expected and they're still working on the extended norms? So, I wonder if it was the test and not our kids, kwim? I would love to hear how the scores from the study compared to the scores of children who had been previously tested.

It might be that your son is more of a high achiever type than you think; high achievement at a young age doesn't prove a child is gifted, just tends to support that hypothesis. Still, a 129 full scale IQ is really still on the low end of gifted, not just bright. In addition, the extremely high working memory could explain how he is able to learn quickly, and would probably give a boost to just about any cognitive task. In other words the scores might be pretty accurate and still point to someone with very unusual thinking ability, but still not perfectly agree with your preconceived notions about your son.

It might also be that he just tested poorly for some reason-- bellyache, bad rapport with the tester, unfamiliar experience leading to anxiety, learning disabilities, etc. The chance of a generally bad test day might be less due to high scores on some of the subtests-- if he had poor rapport with the tester or high anxiety, for example, maybe his working memory wouldn't have tested so high. Do you have other test results that would tend to show that these are inaccurate?

Thanks for your post. It is nice to know we are not alone! I figured there must have been lots of ridiculously low scores for them to put the disclaimer in the letter. My son also tested for over 3 hours but said it was easy. If the test has gone from HG+ kids easily maxing it out to not even registering as gifted, they need to go back to the drawing board. Maybe that is what caused the delay in getting the results out.

I know of a few other people whose kids took the test and will report back if they have the same experience. Some of the kids have been tested before.

This is interesting - will be interesting to see what else comes out re the renorming.

FWIW, it doesn't make sense to me that if the tester ran out of questions on each subtest that the scores were only in the 120s... wouldn't running out of questions indicate hitting ceilings?

polarbear

eta - I don't think it's entirely out of the range of probability that the scores are correct - we have friends who have a very high-achieving dd (grade accelerated, gifted programs, very early reader, etc) who wasn't IQ tested until she'd already been in school several years (and was older). Her IQ is around 120.. which most here wouldn't even think of as gifted - but she's amazingly successful at achieving in school. The IQ number is only one part of the equation. In my family, my EG kiddo isn't the highest achiever, but my HG+ dd has one of those out-of-the-field high working memory scores, and she soars when it comes to schoolwork and moving through new concepts quickly which is, I think, due in large part to her working memory (all of her subtest scores are very strong, but her WM is still much higher). My EG kiddo, otoh, has lower WM than his PRI/VIQ and you can see that in him - he's an amazing thinker, but not a producer of huge amounts of work in a short period of time and on the surface, when you're just looking at academic tasks he doesn't appear to be all that out there. Talk to him and you see the high IQ.

Sounds to me that those scores are off. I don't believe a kid who can read at age 2 is just a high achiever. My son is DYS and way above the DYS IQ cutoff and he didn't read until 2 1/2, to put help put your son in perspective. He also was doing 2nd-3rd grade work in preschool. So your son sounds similar to my PG son. I think you should wait a couple years and have him tested with the WISC or something that's not in the process of being renormed. If I were you I would completely ignore those results.

The ceiling thing is one of the main reasons why I was so surprised by my child's scores. The tester said that my son hit the ceilings in every subtest (I know he missed some along the way, but never enough for her to stop move on before running out of questions). Plus, the tester mentioned afterward that, in her experience, my son is easily highly gifted, if not exceptionally. So, his low scores really don't make sense to me. Also, my son's scores were actually extremely low in the processing speed and working memory sections (high 80's), so even the explanation that he's just a high achiever doesn't really add up. I don't want to hijack the OP's thread, but there's a lot that doesn't add up for me with the scores. It's just really hard for me not to completely dismiss the scores as flat out wrong. We'll likely test again with the WISC once the twelve month window has passed and see how those scores come out.

I don't think that early reading milestones can be reliably mapped to IQ. I also think that high working memory could well be an aid in learning to read.

I wouldn't completely ignore them. There's no way to fake a high working memory, for instance. The presence of high scores also means that there was likely not a rapport or anxiety problem in general for the test. Perhaps there was an attention span problem, since the test ran long-- but overall I don't see why one would completely disregard the results, just because they are different from expected. That's why people test, to weed out the subjective.

I'm surprised they report any scores before they've completed the study. I would also expect them to be doing correlational tests like SB-V for validating their extended norms.

A Google search, which brings up Davidson articles among others, shows that the two are linked. It's the other way that's not linked-- reading later doesn't mean a kid isn't gifted. Further, the earlier they spontaneously read (teach themselves), the higher their IQ.

Because there are so many variables that go into testing, if a test seems completely off, I think it probably is. My 2E/HG son has one really wonky test in his file. While he's generally 97th-98th, on one test, he was in the 20th. If that had been his first test, I think we would have been just as confused as the OP.