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

My other children were identified as gifted/highly gifted once starting school but never displayed any advanced milestones. My youngest is very, very different. When I fist saw the things he was doing around 2 years old it was shocking to me. I think that is what is so confusing about all of this. Out of all my kids he is the only one at this point needing special accommodations.

The criteria required to participate in the WPPSI study was to have kids with previous test scores or milestones that showed HG+. It seems there would be a problem with the re-norming if these kids were showing up as not gifted at all under the new guidelines.

Who knows though. My son may not be a good test taker. I will probably wait a few years and have him take the WISC-IV. These tests are not too important except that they are required to get access to so many gifted services.

I've never posted here before but I just had to reassure the original poster that she is not alone. My sons also participated in the WPSSI IV norming study last spring and their scores are so bad they are laughable. My oldest, who was 7.3 years old when he took the test, received a FSIQ of 118 and my youngest who was 4.75 years old received a FSIQ of 126.

My oldest has qualified as HGT in the Denver Public Schools. His Raven's and CogAT scores were very high (99.9% and 97%). He's been accelerated 2 grades in math and 1 grade in all other subjects at an immersion school....and he's still bored. My youngest spent 2 years in a gifted preschool and just took the CogAT yesterday. I don't know how off his scores are but I'm sure they are still quite low.

I'm not sure what to think about these numbers...but I'm ignoring them for now. The letter we received seem to question the validity of the results. I plan to get them retested using the WSIC soon.

Thank you all. I don't feel crazy anymore!

The confidence interval for a FSIQ is going to cross over the 130 mark so that your child's true score is likely to fall within a range of scores around the 129 score. WPPSI-III norms, for example (that's all I have to refer to) set the 95% CI at 122-133 around a score of 129. So I'm saying the reported score is not really your child's true score necessarily, the error variance within the test means that FSIQ can only ever be an estimate.

No. You cannot infer even a ballpark IQ from any reading milestone. If you think you can, please point to some research support; I'm eager to learn. Anecdata from the likes of Ruf's Levels are not adequate support; I am looking for some reliable way to convert an actual reading milestone to an actual IQ number.

I don't understand your hostility regarding this issue. I'm not going to engage you in some kind of research fight. How silly.

I'm not being hostile. You suggested to the OP that her child has a higher IQ than your son's, based on a reading milestone, and you did so without a solid basis. What's the point of giving false advice?

I tend to agree with Lucounu on the early reading and IQ. I have kids with scores 2 points difference and 3 year difference in when they began reading. One of my friends had her child tested last year at 9yrs old for the gifted program. The child read very early like one of my kids. The score came back high average and -2SD from my later reader. She was shocked and the school retested on a difference test and got the same result. Her child is a bright kid and clearly a high achiever, but not quite in the gifted range. The child spontaneously started reading before preschool.

I would not every get crazy over one test, but I also would not assume early reading is a sure sign of Giftedness. My later reader looked maybe high average in class in kindergarten at best if you just looked at reading. My early reader was so far ahead the school stop measuring at +5yrs in reading at our kindergarten assessment. The Ruff guidelines looked nothing like my DYS kiddo. I just think early mile stones need to be taken with a grain salt. Kids develop at different times and areas. My most athletic kid was so slow in sitting, crawling, rolling over we thought something was wrong. Then in 6 to 8 weeks went from laying on the floor like a bean bag to walking. I'm sure glad I didn't go crazy meeting with doctors over the "delayed" development.

If you only have a test that was in the testing phase, I wouldn't change anything your doing over that. I certainly would not jump into questioning 2E absent of any other indicators of 2E. I think I recall when the Wisc was normed the 130 kids came in around 123 or 124. It can take a little while to iron out these test. Retest in a couple of years, if you feel its needed. I see it as one test on one day. Even when test are well established and out for a while, I personally think at times people put to much weight into a test. If a kid scores super high but no interest in achievement, what does the high IQ really mean? Same goes with the high achiever with a average IQ, doesn't that kid usually do just fine in the end anyway? You see what your child needs are and keep plugging away at that. It's just a test. I always tell people they are the same kid from the day before the test good or bad results.

I don't have the studies to cite, but I have the sense that both Iucounu and syoblrig are sort of right. I've never seen anything linking age of reading to specific scores, certainly (as in, reading before 3 = IQ over 140 or something like that). However, I feel like I've seen it stated many times that there is a pretty strong correlation between self-taught reading before age 5 and giftedness, with earlier reading being linked to more profound giftedness. I don't think it's just Ruf, whom I agree is suspect.

What's actually being argued about here? I'm confused. Two things seem likely to be uncontroversial:

- age of [self-taught*] reading is negatively correlated with IQ (earlier age, higher IQ, *on average*)

- the absolute value of the correlation coefficient is likely to be quite small.

If there is a correlation, it's possible to use one thing to predict the other; that's what correlation means. If it's quite small, one's predictions using this method will not be very accurate.

So...? This thread is about the size of r, or...?

* Without "self-taught" the correlation will surely still be there - because we have no reason to think the taught readers will correlate in the opposite direction from the self-taught ones, and the latter are still there - but the size of the correlation coefficient will be even smaller. We know it's possible to teach almost any baby to read; Glenn Doman made a fortune out of this observation.