Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment High WM on the WISC?

How common is it to have WM be the highest score (more than a standard deviation above the other scores, gifted range), and does that mean anything to anyone? I never put much thought into this three years ago, when the child in question was 6 y.o. and the subtest scores on the other areas were widely scattered and thus it's hard to interpret much from them. We are re-testing soon. A similarly-scoring sibling turned out to be a late bloomer with 99th percentile scores more recently, though that sibling's re-testing was not on the WISC, so comparison to old scores is tricky. I'm hoping the kid in question can score high enough on PR to get into a particular program offered by the school district for math (I feel certain he's bright enough for it, but it's a matter of showing it; the sibling is in this program now). I guess we'll find out soon enough, but looking back at the old scores got me curious about WM, as it seems odd that it would be the highest score.

Also, I'm concerned that he's gotten into the habit of working fast without thinking carefully, due to the teachers he's had the last few years. (Processing speed was average.) I'm a little concerned that he'll behave similarly during the testing...

The few kids I know with high WM scores tend to be very good students, often outperforming their overall IQ scores. In my own kids, my one with high WM didn't have it higher than her other scores, just more in line with her VCI and PRI whereas PS was low. She's found school to be a better fit for how she learns than has her sister whose WM is much lower than her VCI and PRI.

The only other kids I know with high WM were ones who had fairly average VCI and PRI and also had higher PSI than VCI and PRI. They are high achieving students who are often assumed to be gifted and who are tracked into honors classes, but lack the depth and abstract reasoning and ability to draw inferences that I see in kids with similarly high VCI/PRI.

I don't know if any of this would apply to your dc at all! I'm just giving my anecdotes of what we've seen in kids with WM scores that do or do not line up with their other indices.

I don't think it's very common, at least not among the people who post on forums like this (I have no idea how common or uncommon any of us really are so can't judge just from that!). My youngest dd has an very high WM (> 2 SD above some of her scores, > 3 SD above others). Overall, she's a HG, but not EG/PG. She's also only had one IQ test, one time, and it was the WJ-III, not the WISC, so I can't quite compare apples to apples. She's really good at math, but all of her scores point to that being a strong point.


We've had this same challenge with our dd - she works really fast (I suspect because she has such a strong WM)... and she rushes through school work and makes careless mistakes. She's a bit of a puzzle because she's also 2e (which mostly impacts her reading)... and we're constantly having to sort out if a problem with school work is due to her 2e-ness or due to rushing through her work, and she uses that extreme WM to her advantage to hide the 2e challenges.

Our dd has also not done terribly well on standardized testing - she's only been through it once, last year in 2nd grade, and her grades (particularly math) were quite a bit lower than either us (parents) or her teachers expected them to be. I have no idea at this point in time if that was due to her rushing through without thinking about anything, if she got off track on a bubble sheet, or if she really couldn't answer the questions. I doubt it was a case of not being able to answer the questions, because she does very well in an advanced academics school and she after-schools in math for fun. I can absolutely see her rushing through the test just to get it done and not thinking she needs to check her work.

polarbear

Our experience with our dd (as contrasted with our experience with her EG 2e brother) mirrors what Cricket has posted. School has been a much better fit for our high WM dd than it has been for our EG ds. We can also see clear differences in how their brains work in talking to them - dd is obviously a very bright girl with amazing ability to shine at school... but ds has the depth of thinking and ability to draw connections and think up original ideas that sets apart EG/PG kids from most other folks... and we don't see that to the same degree with our high WM dd.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Thanks for the food for thought!!

My son's WM is his highest score, but only a touch higher than VCI. His VCI, WMI and PRI are all tightly clustered together, with PSI almost 40 points lower. It's not a pretty profile!

We also see that he uses his WMI to compensate for low PSI. He rushes through information he thinks he already knows and doesn't always read carefully. He's the kid that will get tricked easily if he's done 10 math problems a certain way and problem 11 switches the question subtly.

We're investigating 2E issues right now because his auditory processing speed seems to be completely on par with the rest of his abilities (listening to directions, telling stories, understanding stories, quick witted fast responses) but his fine motor skills are complete junk- which inhibits the PSI score on the WISC.

My son's WM is his highest score, but only a touch higher than VCI. His VCI, WMI and PRI are all tightly clustered together, with PSI almost 40 points lower. It's not a pretty profile!

We also see that he uses his WMI to compensate for low PSI. He rushes through information he thinks he already knows and doesn't always read carefully. He's the kid that will get tricked easily if he's done 10 math problems a certain way and problem 11 switches the question subtly.

We're investigating 2E issues right now because his auditory processing speed seems to be completely on par with the rest of his abilities (listening to directions, telling stories, understanding stories, quick witted fast responses) but his fine motor skills are complete junk- which inhibits the PSI score on the WISC.