Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment curious...how well did scores match your estimate

With DD10, I had no idea. I was blown away when we got the WISC results back. She is 2E, so maybe this masked some of it? Or maybe, and most likely, we have a very warped sense of 'normal'? In any event, when we met with the tester for the results she showed us a bell curve and asked us to show her where we thought our DD tested. I placed my finger somewhere around 110-120. She took my hand and slid it to the end of the bell curve and, four years later, we still shake our heads some days.

DS4 had his testing last week and we are still awaiting the results. I am inclined to believe that he will be at least MG simply because of his sister. I realize that I can't be trusted to guess! Watching the testing, he did so much better than I ever anticipated. There were parts where I actually felt sorry for him and his 4 year old attention span because they went on for so long that even I was getting bored. I guess we will find out in two weeks!

I thought DD9 was probably gifted, maybe with a shot at DYS-level, but that her 2e characteristics would probably pull her down. Instead, she comfortably made DYS, with her GAI with extended norms quite a bit higher.

When DS11 was around preschool age, I thought he might be a happy, well-adjusted average kid. He was different from my eldest, who was twelve years older (also gifted) and from a previous marriage. Eldest wanted to do math problems, puzzles and asked endless questions. Youngest wasn't interested in coloring, writing, puzzles, and the only questions he asked were those concerning his current obsessions. In preschool, the teacher remarked he preferred to play by himself on the playground and he wasn't reading yet, though we read to him.

He entered Kindergarten and by the end of the year the Kindergarten teacher noted that he was "worldly" among other things, and she started the works for testing the following year. He almost didn't get in to the gifted program because he was just short of the cutoff (I think he needed to be 99% or 98% and he was one percent under). His teacher's assistant brought up the fact he seemed to be beyond grade level in math and they tested him in math, though that wasn't the norm. He was added to the gifted pullout program soon after. He had some emotional "symptoms" of giftedness, which helped us to be more understanding, but really, for a long, long, time I thought he was very bright, but not necessarily more than that. EXCEPT, in 2nd grade he was able to write a story and read it aloud with amazing confidence, and he was able to sing solo in 2nd grade with inflection and character and seemingly no uneasiness. And then in 3rd he was writing amazing stories, stories I would type for him because his writing abilities were not up to the level of his mind. And he made movies. So...glimpses of giftedness, but I didn't think much more about it.
Then in 5th he took an above-level test called EXPLORE, and slowly, after researching what his DYS-level results meant, it dawned on me that maybe we'd been letting our ds coast through school with little effort and receiving too-little support from us. He'd by then learned to be hindered by his perfectionist tendencies, and I did wonder if the explore results were a fluke, but when the school tested him months later, the WISC backed up the explore results, right down to the higher verbal than math. (Ironically it was the reverse when he was first identified)
So I guess I'm one of those who didn't really know, and when I did, I didn't realize how gifted and how asynchronous his abilities were. When I had the information in my hands, things started making sense.

There is an article somewhere on Hoagies that I read when investigating what we saw with DS several years ago that says parents are actually very good predictors of giftedness but perhaps that is at the more extreme ranges rather than normal levels of gifted?

With DS at first we thought he was smart, sort of regular gifted like his parents. Then thought must not be seeing what I think I am seeing. Then was scared of what I was seeing. Then got him tested first at 4.5 then at 6. Both times he got DYS scores but you could also see what we now know at his 2e issues. Lower scores in areas we wouldn't have expected as he presents as more globally gifted, although he has his areas where he just blows you away.

He actually took a 3rd test - and had an ear infection blow up in the middle of it - had a fever by the end of testing and ended up a standard dev lower overall, but bizarrely still got the hard questions right but kept getting the easy ones wrong. The psych was so frustrated by him, thought he had a real attitude problem until we met to discuss a week later and explained that he had a 104 fever!! Funny though that being ill makes him intolerant of simple q's rather than unable to figure out harder ones!

So I guess we kind of always knew but the scores put a label on him that at first was wow that's cool and impressive, then wow that's scary cause it will need a lot of help, then hey it's just who he is. Although in some areas I don't think the scores really captured what he can do, but it's just a test so how could it.

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We always figured gifted, as DH and I both are comfortably into HG range.

But our lack of experience with child development meant that we didn't know just HOW far out there she was. At first.

We still don't, actually-- not having had any individual IQ testing to go by. On the other hand, she comfortably sails over CTY, TIP, and EPGY requirements at 3-7 years beyond her chronological age, and has since she was 5-6yo. So she's clearly at least EG, and probably PG, which is what we've figured since-- it wasn't the age at which she started reading (which is late by HG standards, even); it was the rate at which she transitioned to mastery. Her reading level has been about what a college-educated adult could muster since about 18 months after she learned to decode. Since she was about 7, she has read even adult level material with downright preternatural speed.

I'm piping up here because we weren't necessarily in denial. If anything, we found the prospect of just how gifted a little... disquieting... when we thought about it too hard. I wanted her to be a kid first, and a side show attraction not at all, and I suspected that having the number would launch her into freakshow status. I didn't want to know because it might change how we saw her. To be clear, though-- DD is evidently "simple" gifted-- meaning that she has no 2e matters muddying those waters, and she is not terribly ACADEMICALLY asynchronous, so in terms of accommodation, it wasn't necessary to know in order to know what to do with her.

I don't think that having the number would have led to better accommodation or advocacy, anyway. It's always been quite clear to the schools just what she is, too. They can SEE that she's a PG kid by her performance. It's just that (locally) they can't really do much in the way of authentically appropriate instruction for PG kids.

My FSIQ estimates on my DD started at about 140 when she was a toddler-- but I have had to revise them upwards several times during her lifetime. I think that we're probably fairly accurate on the basis of what she actually chooses to SHOW us, mind-- because the majority of people in her extended family have been tested using a S-B tool at one point or another, and so we have genetically-related examples ranging from 98 up through 168-174. So we have a better idea than a lot of people what the numbers can mean in a functional sense, and what they don't. Nobody in my family or my DH's has cured cancer or won a Nobel Prize, but there are definitely patterns of social distress, multipotentiality gone wrong, perfectionism, existential struggles, etc. Now at 14, I'd place her toward the very top end of that range in a functional sense, and fortunately, her personality is not dissimilar to the two individuals in that range (one on my side, one on her dad's). That has been helpful in terms of knowing what she might need help with, and why. But in a functional sense, we only see what she chooses to demonstrate on any given day, too, and mostly that leads to underestimation.

It may be interesting to see what that value actually is at some point. It's possible that she's +4 or +5 and not +3 standard deviations like we think, but in any case, that leads us into waters that are merely "slightly more uncharted" from a place where the navigational directions aren't so good to start with, so from a parenting standpoint, it matters little from what I can tell. She's a singularity either way.

That one always bugs me, because the research the article talks about has parents fill out a specific questionaire that has questions that correlate to giftedness. Distinctly different than asking a parent how gifted their kid is.

We knew DS was gifted, but without a huge personal sample size of same age kids or rock solid benchmarks, there is really no way to know how far out there. Before his school started talking about the highly gifted program (which got me to find this site,) LoG wasn't really something I thought about beyond "a gifted program will get him the right material."

As to the IQ results, I was disappointed to find out that the psychologist was inexperienced with it (SB-V) and had some disdain for it. His testing was a bit below the qualifiers for the HG program, but there was a huge pattern of depressed scores(> -1SD) where vision is a key component (half the SB-V is non-verbal.)

But I'm still surprised at his achievement score >160 in math as I've always been more impressed with his language skills. And I'm still interested in getting the WISC done, the only good motivation for it being needing a higher IQ score to qualify for Epsilon Camp.

I think there's no contradiction in parents having a very good idea of their child's abilities, but not be able to convert this to a score or percentile ranking, because they don't have a good handle on what the general population is like.

I pegged our kiddo at mildly to mabye possibly the lower end of highly gifted, because in my head profoundly gifted meant prodigy. Very surprised and kind of freaked out by how much we underestimated.

I am SOOO tempted to get DS5 (turned 5 today) tested! But I'm trying to wait till he starts Kindergarten next week and has some interest in reading. We know he's all around super sharp, very mathy kid but lacks any interest in reading / writing and I've had a suspicion he might have some issues in that area (dyslexia if I was to take a wild guess) so we're waiting to see what Kindergarten brings. I'm thinking he's got to be at least 130-135 but wouldn't be surprised if a tester came back with 145. If it comes in lower, fine with us. We KNOW he's very bright and nothing like other kids we know.
With DS3.5, we have no idea what to think and no idea how to test him. He's seriously 2E and while he acts like a little genius at home, he acts like a kid with IQ70 (and I might be overestimating) in public and in social situations. He might never (in the next 5 or 10 years) be willing and able to perform and I just don't see how they could test him. Unless there will be an IQ test that we can install on my Kindle, give it to him and pick it up in his room in the morning. He does not understand or ignores?) the most BASIC concepts in daily life, but seems to comprehend very complex problems. So, yeah, NO idea. If he didn't have 2E issues, I'd say 140-160 but the way he is, there's absolutely no way of telling and no chance he'll cooperate ... for now.

Yes. Same here.