Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Written expression?

Yes, I had gleaned that. We scribed thank you emails at Christmas for him and had him use Dragon to capture some thoughts/arguments. Spontaneously spoken his language and structure is complex and verbose. At the moment it isn't clear if the handwriting holds back his written complexity or if it is an issue of planning or simply a lack of exposure/appropriate level instruction. I think our one/two week crash course didn't make a big impact particularly with the holidays, but we captured some things richer than he's done at school.

However, the writing samples we have are now sent along to the school. Next week we are to meet with the school psychologist to see the IQ results. The submission package is also going in next week.

Thanks again for the helpful ideas.

I don't have any solid evidence - I was assuming that the distribution for writing is not extremely different from the distributions for standardized math and reading scores, where the top 5% of one grade is well above average (50th percentile) for two grades up or more.

I would agree that a top 5th grader should be a much more proficient writer than a top 3rd grader. While I am confident that the written responses produced by DS and DD in third grade surpassed those of the average 5th grader, I am equally certain that they did not surpassed the top 5th graders.

However, I also realized that we are not talking about the same kind of writing. The reason why I was so impressed was because the writiing samples were insightful answers to literary analysis type questions completed independently in class under time constraints (10-15 minutes to analyze and produce the written responses).

The type of writing projects to which you refer are also common in our school but I don't tend to be impressed by them and the teachers don't normally give them much weight for grading purposes because it is not possible to control/determine how much input are provided by parents. I have to say that I have been shocked by how much of the work that some parents tell me they do for their children.