Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment When to assess

This is why most GT program starts at third or fourth grade. I seem to recall for all the kids tested gifted at 4 or 5 for K entry, only 30 or 40% will test gifted at 8 or 9, and a lot of truly gifted kids won't test well at a younger age due to maturity issues.

Of course, the higher the number at 4, the less likely the child is going to slow down later. But at the margin, the false positive/negative rates are high.

When we looked into testing for our DD at 3.4, the private tester we consulted with told us she would recommend testing at that age only if it would change our educational decisions for her. We went ahead with it because her preschool teacher was recommending acceleration, and we wanted to make the most informed decision possible.

With her older sister, we're going to do testing at 6.10. We weren't planning on it, because she seems perfectly appropriate, happy and sufficiently challenged at the traditional grade level. But we decided that she deserved us having as much information about her as we had about her sister, so we're going to go ahead with it, even though we don't anticipating it changing anything.

I guess that's all to say that if you feel like she's in the right place for now, I might hold off a bit if it were me, but definitely pursue it later, or now if you suspect she might need something different.

This is the dilemma. Early testing is unreliable. But at these young ages, the differences in ability, and the differences in educational needs, are definitely there. These early grades need to let kids move at their own pace, and not try to keep them all in lockstep.

I agree. We tested at 3. I realize that there is a pretty large error bar around the scores at this age. However it helped us realize how inappropriate the preschool environment for DC was.

We will probably test at least once and possibly twice more.

This is actually an interesting issue - what is optimal? The tester who tested DD said between 6-8 years old was best. I know others have opined 8-9 is better. I actually felt when all was said and done that 8 was rather LATE for having DD tested, especially for gifted girls, who tend to start to "hide" by age 9 (perhaps others can quote more specifics, but Linda Silverman has discussed this, #4):

http://www.gifteddevelopment.com/What_is_Gifted/learned.htm.

Is this only true for girls, though?

Also, by 8, DD definitely "lost" time in school. I would like to learn from this and see if I can avoid this with younger DS. As 22B said, kids need to learn at their own pace. The "lockstep learning plan" used by many schools is not good for either of my DC, and probably not for many of the children discussed on this board.

The tester told us that schools respect the Wisc more than earlier administrated tests. So, she encouraged us to wait until ds7 was 6.

The WJ cognitive is an IQ test and yeilds a general ability index which is equivalent to fsiq (not to be confused with the wisc agjusted score which I think is gai as well).

It has ten suggests (there are 13 I think but 10 is the standard battery). The report scores them seperately then uses them to get 5 cluster scores. The test is normed over a huge range and can be used from 3 up. I don't think it uses any reading or writing skills so it is not as suseptible to the effect of early reading. My kids took about 1.75 hours to do it but their tester is very experienced with gifted kids.

FWIW, my ds (low PSI on WISC due to fine motor dysgraphia) scored in a similar range on GIA on WJ-III Cog as he did on the WISC GAI (his FSIQ was lower due to PSI score). I actually found the WJ-III Cog test more useful than the WISC for each of my kids - it caught a memory challenge with my younger dd that was hidden on the WISC. In a bit of a rush now so no time to really explain. In general I felt that my ds' particular challenge (fine motor) actually impacted him less on the WJ-III.

Our school district also prefers to use the WJ-III Cog over the WISC because they believe it doesn't ceiling out as quirky for highly gifted children. Don't know if that's true or not, but that's what we were told by our school psych.

polarbear

We are about to test my DS6 (by school decision). DD was also tested at 6, though she was an older 6 (midway through 1st, rather than summer of K like DS). I felt DD, who has decent self-control in situations like this, was a little young, and I am now really feeling like DS is still too young, after trying him out on some practice questions (obviously, I am not a psychologist). I can't imagine testing a 4yo.

I feel like DD would have attended beautifully to an IQ test at age 8 and would have given the test her full attention; she had the maturity by then. Of course, as has been pointed out, that's a lot of lost time in school. I don't know the answer. It is/was obvious that both of my children needed more, starting in K.

The WJs are designed on a different model of intelligence than the Wechslers (which, of course, were originally designed on no model of intelligence at all, just a pragmatic need of Dr. Wechsler's to distinguish intellectually-disabled patients in his psychiatric population from those who were not). Over the years, the tests have influenced each other, with the WJ exercising the greater influence over the Wechslers, likely due to the advantages of having a theoretical model over not.

The WJs have all been based on various iterations of the CHC (Cattell-Horn-Carroll, named, obviously, after the respective psychologists) model, which de-emphasizes (not removes, as the GIA is still important) the concept of a unitary "g" general intelligence construct, in favor of a number (seven, if I recall, on the WJIII) of more-or-less equally-important clusters. (The equivalent on the WISC is the four factors.)

For those who enjoy additional technical info, this is a brief document comparing the about-to-be-obsolete WJIII with the already-obsolete previous round of Wechslers. It does give you a little bit of an idea of the difference between the models, though.

http://www.riverpub.com/clinical/pdf/WJIII_ASB1.pdf

You'll notice that one of the most handy aspects of the WJ compared to the Wechslers for the gifted population is that it is continuously-scored from age 4 to 90+ (from age 2-4, not all of the subtests are available).

Also, because it has many more cognitive factors on it than the Wechslers do, it has greater potential for identifying internal variability, such as in some of the subtler LDs. And, for the same reason, the factors tend to be separated better on the actual tasks (e.g., not confounding perceptual motor and perceptual reasoning in the same task, as happens often on the WISC block design subtest).

...Just realized that I am about to launch off into even more eye-glazing psychometric minutiae, so I'd better stop!