Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Which subtests would be impacted by vision?

We are about to finish vision testing heading in to vision therapy and I was looking back through our old WPPSI report wondering what might have been impacted...

Notably low scores were block designs, picture concepts, symbol search and (vastly low) coding.

Any good articles you know of which discuss this?

All the PRI and PSI tests are vision dependent. Block design and coding are also motor dependent.

Interesting. Matrix reasoning was in the ceiling issue realm in PRI but the others were quite low comparatively.

HappilyMom, my dd who had severe double vision (unknown to us at the time) scored really really low on coding and symbol search on the WISC, and relatively low on only one of the PRI subtests (sorry, I can't remember which one!). She had a follow-up visual-motor integration test in which she did ok on one subtest and tanked another one.

If you google "WISC subtest descriptions" you should be able to find a reference with descriptions of each subtest, and that might be worth looking at to see how vision impacts the PRI subtests

Best wishes,

polarbear

I was told that a big discrepancy between block design and matrix reasoning was a red flag for vision issues.

Wow thank you all! Kai that is fascinating. Wish my tester had known that.

I did google (duh! thanks polar) and all the scales that tanked for him involved copying something or scanning a pic for info. All of this would involve lots of focusing for him that we have now seen him struggle with mightily. It explains a lot!

Our tester thought his results were an "under-estimate" already. So we have ceilings (WPPSI is only up to 7yr olds anyway so even beginning at 4 there isn't much "room" to be had there) and a vision issue. Makes me wonder if my HG kiddo is EG or PG... It will be interesting to see the numbers shift and settle after VT and using extended norms.

Taking this even further, I am wondering if the clinically significant differences between expected performance and actual performance on the WIAT could be at least partially explained by vision...

Our results show a word reading score 36pts HIGHER than predicted by VIQ (perhaps ceiling related?? Word Reading was a perfect 160 on WIAT) and math reasoning score 26pts LOWER than predicted by PIQ.

I think I am generally looking back saying, "Oh!" now that makes sense to me. Back then it was more these are unusual scores but we don't know why.