Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment 29 point IQ drop in two years with no symptoms

My daughter was given the WASI-II at age 7 years, 9 months for admission into the school's gifted program. She scored

Verbal 136
Performance 129
Full Scale 138

In the two years since, she has thrived in the program, which is pull out one day/week. We have been noticing some attention and maturity issues, more at home and in her regular classroom than in the gifted program, and wanted to get a full evaluation.

I got very upsetting WISC-IV results last week, at age 10. She got:

Verbal Comprehension 112
Perceptual Reasoning 110
Working Memory 113
Processing Speed 85
Full Scale 109
General Ability Index 113

Verbal Subtests:

Similarities Scaled Score 14
Vocabulary Scaled 14
Comprehension Scaled 9

Perceptual Reasoning Subtests:

Block Design 13
Picture Concepts 10
Matrix Reasoning 12

Working Memory Subtests:

Digit Span 13
Letter-Number Seq 12

Processing Speed Subtests:

Symbol Search 8
Coding 7

The tester was very dismissive, saying IQ is very fluid before age 10 and not being concerned about a 29 point FSIQ drop. The pediatrician, on the other hand, said that is a huge difference and they are actually pretty stable at nearly age 8, so one test must be wrong. He asked what her dad and my IQs were, and upon hearing that they are pretty close to her original score, said the higher score must be right because heredity plays a huge role. I realize this is dismissive the other direction.

The tester also said she does not have ADHD, although she scored quite distracted on his test, she still got enough answers right to be in the average range. My instinct says that she got so many right because she's bright, and that she really does have ADHD.

My daughter says she was not stressed at all on the day of the exam, although she did have trouble falling asleep the night before (this is not super unusual, though) and the morning of the exam was very stressful for me because we could not find the office at a large university because they were not answering their phones because, as it turned out, the building had been evacuated for a natural gas leak. The building smelled strongly, and we were re-evacuated, and when we returned, the building was still airing out and had a slight smell and the windows were open, making it somewhat warmer than usual. However, she says none of this bothered her. She was unaware that she was being timed or that there were any stakes at all to right or wrong answers, for better or for worse.

What do you think is going on?

Here are some considerations:

1. Your daughter's lowest (and in some cases, discrepant) subtest scores on the VCI and PRI were also the subtests that have no equivalent on the WASI-II. Of course, this applies even more to the entire WMI and PSI clusters. So, on some level, this is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison.
2. The truth is somewhere in-between early IQs being so fluid that the first one is entirely wrong and heredity being so important that the second IQ is entirely wrong. Obviously.
3. There are other possible diagnoses that can manifest as difficulty with attention and wise decision-making. ADHD is one of them, but so are nonverbal learning disability, any of the sleep disorders, and even depression, anxiety, or allergies. You mention that poor sleep is a regular occurrence. I would start from there.
4. That is a marked relative weakness in processing speed, and ought not to be ignored. Did the evaluator give you any feedback about it? In a moment, I'll bring up some bigger issues about PSI, but I should also mention that it can have effects on the PRI, because Block Design is timed. One of the big differences between a 7 yo and a 10 yo on block design is the extent to which bonus points for speed factor into your ultimate scaled score. A 7 yo is not expected to get many of the designs correct, therefore any correct design within the overall item time limit will get maximum credit. Any 10 yo should be solving more of the designs, so bonus points for speed begin to figure into spreading the upper part of the curve.

On to PSI in general: Her PSI would be considered a normative weakness, in addition to being a personal weakness, and suggests further investigation for a learning disability of some kind, which then has implications for the impact of an unidentified 2e. The relative weakness in Comprehension tends to support this thought, as it differs from the other two VCI subtests in having substantially more language, and drawing on a certain amount of inferential learning from daily life and experience. Without knowing anything else about your daughter, I can't say exactly what the difference might represent for her, but it is definitely unusual.

If she does have a 2e, that would be another possible explanation for the behaviors; children who sense that they are underperforming, but can't figure out how to remediate it themselves, sometimes have difficulty paying attention, and may attempt to mask deficits with silly behavior.

Processing speed is particularly important to fluent written expression and automaticity in calculating. Fourth grade in many schools marks the transition to a significant increase in expectations for lengthy or analytical writing and math problem solving (which is much easier to do if one is not bogged down with calculations that should be automatic, like multiplication facts). Is it possible that the behaviors are symptomatic of difficulty meeting academic expectations, not necessarily because of intellectual reasons, but because of learning difference reasons?

I do not know if there is anything to this, but I'd read that:

"For girls, in particular, early IQ scores are more reliable than those obtained after they have been socialized into hiding their abilities.

At the Gifted Development Center, we have found that the optimal time to test gifted children is between the ages of four and nine. We find that at the age of nine, test scores for gifted children usually decline, sometimes as much as 20 points, due to (1) ceiling effects (test items not being sufficiently difficult to measure the full range of abilities); (2) perfectionism (particularly in girls), leading to unwillingness to guess when uncertain; and (3) the increased emphasis on crystallized (learned) knowledge and skills rather than fluid abilities (purer forms of abstract reasoning, considered innate)."

http://www.malonefamilyfoundation.org/whatisgifted_assessing2.html

This is why I have no plans (unless absolutely necessary) to obtain a second IQ test for my son.
aeh is the expert.

1. It sounds like she is performing well in her gifted program at school. That would have been my first question.
2. Has she had an achievement test and do her results more closely match the first or second IQ score? We had our son take the WJ III achievement because we wanted to see if there were significant differences between his IQ and performance.

If this were my DS and I had suspicions of ADHD or something else, I would consider a more comprehensive evaluation. If my DS were doing very well otherwise, I might chalk it up to a bad test day.

I don't know enough about IQ or gifted programs to say this with certainty, but if your daughter is doing well on achievement testing and in her school program, I would find the second IQ score to be suspect.

In 3rd grade, my daughter scored in the 99th percentile on the Terra Nova portion of the state testing. We are still waiting for 4th grade scores, which should come in September.

How long were you in the building while it smelled of gas? It's possible that the gas affected her cognitive abilities (it does that).

I was gassed once in college and went to a language table for dinner right afterwards. I was pretty good at this language, but literally could not put three words together correctly that evening. I think I went to bed right after dinner and slept all night.

I wasn't aware of how I'd been affected until the next day.

We were in the building for about 10 minutes while the smell was strong, and then were evacuated for another half hour to 45 minutes. When we went back in, the smell was faint and the windows were open.

aeh, I think the evaluator described it as a personal weakness. He said that because she worked very slowly but made no mistakes, he attributed it to anxiety. Even when I called back later after doing some research, he did not think anything was wrong. He even said during the follow-up visit that that he was looking for major problems during the IQ test, and that since she was average/high average, he didn't see any reason to worry. He said on the later phone call that because the WASI is abbreviated, he places less weight on it (true, but four of the subtests are identical, and those scores were dramatically different, as well).

He is a psychology resident who has just completed his residency, but his work was still being reviewed by faculty until his title change was official.

Some other things I didn't love about the evaluator--he cut and pasted a lot of the report, leaving "his" instead of "her" and some grammatical errors (subject/verb agreement) that made it obvious he was recycling reports.

One test he administered involved DD looking at pictures and telling a story about them. When she left the test, she told me that she was well aware the last picture had been bunnies, but she pretended they were cats because she is obsessed with the "Warriors" series and wanted to tell a story about that.

At the follow-up, he said that the story had been unusually well-crafted, and that he had been surprised that she admitted that she had based it on characters from a book. He interpreted this as her being eager to please and get approval from an authority figure, so she plagiarized a story from a book. It's true that she loves praise and approval. However, she also just really loves to talk about those books. I asked her later if the whole story was from the books, and she said not at all. She based the characters from the book, but made up a new story about them. It was basically "fan fic", although she doesn't know that term. So, while he was right that she craves approval, he was completely wrong in assuming that the whole story was plagiarized and that she wasn't capable of making a story like that up on her own. And he didn't ASK her if the story was original; he just assumed that "based on" meant "stolen".

You may wish to raise your concerns with the test center.