Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Group ability tests vs. IQ tests

I guess that what I'm getting at in regard to false positives are kids who score high on the group test but not an individual IQ test. I'm not necessarily implying that their group test scores were falsely high on the group test but more that they are not necessarily indicative of intellectual giftedness but rather high achiever, convergent thinker -ness :-) ( sorry for the made up suffix! )

For instance, and this is a very small anecdote, but I know two kids locally who had high CogAT and/or OLSAT scores but average scores on the WISC with no unusual scatter on the WISC indicating depressed scores from a 2e issue or something else. They both also had high working memory and processing speed on the WISC relative to their other WISC indices leaving me wondering if one can appear gifted on a group test through a combo of high speed, memory, and in the box thinking, none if which would necessarily say "gifted" to me.

Yes! This is the type of "gifted" some programs are seeking really. The well behaved model student with motivation, speed, and memory. We walked away from a "gifted" school which clearly sought that type. They are the easy ones to dress up pretty and show off rather than the quirky EG, PG and 2e kiddos.

This leads to a thought I've had floating around recently particularly as my readings have been on very memory focused subjects. Basically is there a range of gifted that is reasonably successful, but overlooked and undernourished because their outlier skill is in long term memory?

Even to go as far as eidetic memory without a strong abstract reasoning/g level. It seems they would work well with some special differentiation that plays to their strengths. They may be even poorer advocates for themselves than the g-loaded gifted. Where the abstract reasoner is building out vocabulary rapidly from context, the memory talented might do better with early dictionary training. shrug

Interesting. This is what I've been thinking, especially after meeting with the principal regarding ds. She started off saying they have large gifted population (public school- and everyone wants their kid in gt program). Yet, when we showed her ds Wisc scores; she kept saying, "wow. These are very high scores." Dh and I found this funny since tester told us score was brought down by 2e issues and would be higher if retested later. Also, if the gifted population at school is so high, ds scores wouldn't be so shocking.

I just hope the gt will appropriately challenge and enjoy my ds. Really, I just hope ds has a better year at school next year....

Yeah, that's the spot we're in too. The large majority of the kiddos in our GT programming are the high achiever, in the box kids who can spit back out rote learned information very well, read fast, have their hands in the air a lot, teacher pleasers, A student types, but aren't kids who see abstractions, create new ways to do things, etc. My kids have had a harder fit and so many teacher simply misunderstand what gifted looks like IMHO.

That's where I have a hard time with Lohman's, the CogAT author, assertions that achievement and ability are essentially one and the same (and with the NAGC seeming to move in that direction too). It isn't that I am saying that high achievement means that a child isn't gifted, just that it isn't the defining factor in determining giftedness nor is achievement alone, even if very high, (in the absence of an IQ score in the top 2% or so) necessarily enough to support a gifted id.

We had the same experience with our dd14 when we brought her WISC-IV & WJ scores to the school when she was seven. The district GT coordinator told me to homeschool her b/c they wouldn't be able to meet her needs and one of the school admin people we met with looked at the report and said something like, "wow, this really is a gifted child!" It left me totally confused for the same reason as you: dd's scores were all over the place from low average on sections she refused to complete to 99.9th+ and the composite of all of that was not a DYS level score for instance, although still reasonably evidently HG. I didn't expect that to be a "wow" thing - it was just gifted and in line with where I expected all kids who were considered gifted to be at that time. Over time, I've come to realize that a lot of what they are seeing in their gifted programming are kids who have composite scores in the 70s or 80s (percentiles) on group tests with just one area in the 95th and certainly not composite scores in the top 1 or 2 percent, although achievement may be there. They also don't see a lot of 99.9th scores apparently.

I've been given the impression that our district has a high average but the distribution is not symmetric or normal about the median, such that the district's 2 sigma population is still about 130. That suggests that there's a sharp drop off in scores above the median.

In english for the not so mathy amongst us Geofizz?

Sorry. I tend to do that sometimes.

The bell curve is bent. Ours is skewed to a higher middle, but it drops off sharply at higher scores, such that the gifted range (>130) is still only ~5% of our population.

Edit: expanding on that, despite having a lot of kids who test highly, a child testing a lot higher will still be quite unusual.

Ok the private school my kids used to go to had a weird distribution - they attracted plenty of bright kids of wealthy parents, so a big bump around 120-135, but also lots of 2e kids of wealthy parents (bright kids but unable to function well maybe only one index is high and the others pull them down), the top end was also skewed a bit too, but not as much as they seemed to think :-).