Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Should I have my daughter tested?

Awesome, that's a spot-on analogy.

Wow!!! Agree, agree!! I love this - what a good way to put it! With your permission (Dude) I may have to use this at some point when speaking with our school. If they can't understand the straight-shooting approach, maybe they will get it through this.

Absolutely. I hope it helps.

Test. I think of it as not going to the doctors because you think you have an incurable disease because they can't do anything about it. Even if you turn out to be right you will gain useful information from the doctor.

Testing prevents second guessing yourself.

While I absolutely agree with everything that Dude ( very apt analogy - especially as many of us have been forced to 'secretly train' our kids) wrote earlier, I will add that walking the superintendent through the Iowa Acceleration Scale and supplying some copies of the forms that we typed up ourselves ( why the forms are not sold is beyond me) is ultimately what clinched the deal on getting our DD accelerated.

As Dude noted earlier, on one level, testing will merely confirm what YOU already know but objectively verified results will help to start the dialogue to the school because you will not just be saying that you *think* that your DD is smart; you will have the data to back you up.

Our experience was that once we had the data the school did acknowledge her abilities ( she had also demonstrated above grade abilities to teachers by the time ) but then, predictably, the school raised the 'social issues' objection. I got the idea about the IOWA Acceleration Scale from this forum. It lays the emotions to side and focuses purely on the data in a very balanced way. Ymmv but it certainly worked for us.

Of course my son's current teacher says "we don't use the word gifted" even if you have shown me the test results and "he and a girl are ahead in maths so I give them the next level of whatever we are doing after they have finished", strangely enough he doesn't always jump at the opportunity of more work which may also be too easy.

I believe that Kids like ours are so thin on the ground that most elementary teachers have no idea of how to teach them because they just haven't encountered that LOG before. What they have encountered, though, is Tiger parents that insist that their hothoused snowflake is the next Einstein. I think that they therefore slip into the 'give the kid more work and they will shut up' rut.

My DD had a teacher like that last year who decided that DD cannot that too bright just because she didn't do more dross worksheets. To her credit, once she saw DD's scores she became a believer and a full on advocate for DD's acceleration because she made the connection on her own that DD hadn't done the extra work because it was way below her level and therefore not at all interesting,

Absolutely. I was told, flat out, by the diagnostician (who does both the spec ed & g&t testing for the whole district) that she'd never seen a score as high as my sons... and it was 145.. many on this board have kids with much, much higher scores. They honestly had nothing in place to work with kids like him. It was just more worksheets and more worksheets.

{blink. blink}


Wow, Epoh.

I just don't think of that as THAT high. Not to the point that a professional should be so gobsmacked, I mean. Not very confidence building for a parent to hear that.

No? I can't imagine why.

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To the OP, your story sounds almost identical to our experience with our (now 14yo) DD. We thought "Oh, we'll just do preK at home... it'll be fun! A little Montessori, mommy-and-me time with a few artsy classes, and she'll be thrilled and ready for K in a year."

Well, no.

Because by then she was scarfing down books like potato chips, avidly interested in world affairs, and working quite readily with fractions and negative numbers.

We have never had our DD tested. She has a pair of parents with SB IQ scores in the 150-ish range, and extended family members far higher than that. She easily outstrips her parents' ability. It's very obvious that she is "way, way out there" and therefore, she qualifies pretty much without formal assessment for whatever the school has on offer-- we often don't even have to ask-- they ask US.

We've never had the ability to send her off for extremely high LOG events/camps/activities, so that reason for having the number didn't apply.

She's been fine so far with us just interacting with the child that we see in front of us. A number can't give you that, after all, and the larger the value is, the fewer the resources you'll have to use as a road-map anyway. You already have a lot of evidence to suggest that you're well into "throw away child development guidelines" territory.

What would change if you had the number? I'd answer that before seeking it, because I do tend to agree with the "fruit of knowledge" remark. Things known cannot be UN-known.