Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Test discrepancy

DS7 had the WISC IV shortly after his 6th birthday as a part of a neuropsych eval. He scored in the 140s for PRI but only around 114 for VCI. Fast forward 1.5 years later and he is taking above-level tests for reading/math in school, where the ceiling is really high, like a 12th grade level. Given his lowish VCI I suspected he would have trouble with higher level reading comprehension but he is scoring well above the 99th percentile. For vocabulary, the test put him at a 7th grade equivalent, meaning he is scoring like the average 7th grader. I think that his grade equivalent for all the various reading scales was about the same, around 6th-7th grade (like long passage, non-fiction, fiction, etc). But on the WISC he was in the average range for vocabulary and comprehension. I'm trying to figure out why the tests would yield different results. Obviously a reading achievement test is not an IQ test, but they ask similar things (like defining vocab words). Could it be just the format of the WISC (where kids have to give an oral answer/explanation) vs. the multiple choice version of the reading test? Anyone else experience this? DS is actually scoring higher on the reading tests (including vocabulary) than DD did at his age, and she was in the 130s for VCI on the WISC (and her reading fluency was excellent so poor decoding ability wouldn't explain it). I would love it if the WISC was wrong and he does not really have the huge gap the way I thought he did--but who knows. I'm also debating whether to allow the school to give him the CogAT. Maybe he'd actually do better on it than the WISC.

Higher achievement lower IQ is a good "problem" to have compared to higher IQ lower achievement.

Normally it wouldn't even matter but our district has rigid cut-offs/policies and they want both achievement AND IQ (if you can call a CogAT "IQ" which you really can't). And to make matters worse someone told me that they are thinking about eliminating "non-verbal" scores and just looking at verbal and math. They seem to want high-achievers, not "visual spatial learners". They don't care if kids can solve a puzzle in 5 seconds. That's not going to help in language arts or math classes (according to them). All of this is just speculation at this point, I'm trying to piece together various comments that I've heard and figure out what my options are. Luckily DS is very strong in math and has high reading achievement scores as well but I'm guessing they will want everything to "match" nicely and want a good CogAT or WISC verbal score.

Yes. Schools want high-achievers; they don't want kids who are outside the norm. It creates problems that they then have to solve or ignore.

Two things come to mind:

1. In order to receive full credit on the WISC-IV verbal subtests, you need to generate responses of sufficient specificity and complexity. On a multiple choice test, you can have an idea of the meaning of a word adequate for recognizing the correct response, without being able to produce it.

2. There are few contextualized verbal tasks on the WISC-IV, whereas the reading passages you describe would all have to be in meaningful contexts. Context and meaning often help conceptual learners.

And school doesn't use much in the way of high visual-spatial ability, especially before higher math. Although they should watch out about skipping the nonverbal cognitive scores in screening, as that's usually the one measure that keeps district TAG programs from being slammed for discriminatory practices against CLD kids.

They want everything to be nice and matchy matchy. Like the GT coordinator last year telling me that DD's WISC math score would need to match her math achievement score with both being above 98th percentile. Same with reading. They want reading achievement to match verbal on the CogAT. Luckily it was via email or she would have found me yelling "What are you talking about! You're going to pull her arithmetic score from the WISC and use that as evidence of math reasoning?!" So if they use a kids' non-verbal score from the CogAT, it's not going to "match" any achievement score. And therefore it's a problem for them and their matrix so why not just eliminate? Like i said, it's speculation at this point but I talked to someone I trust to have somewhat valid information.

Rhetorical question: What do you suppose is a better predictor of a child's success in a math class? Their performance on a measure of cognitive ability, or their performance on a measure of math achievement?

I think it depends on the level, because some kids will do well on math achievement early on, if they are ahead of the curve learning math facts, addition/subtraction, etc. That doesn't mean they will do well with higher level abstract concepts. However, at a certain point it will be extremely difficult or impossible for a kid to get achievement scores above a certain level if they don't have the cognitive ability. For instance DS scored like an average 9th-10th grader on the computerized math achievement test. I don't care how his CogAT comes back for math, a kid isn't going to be able to score that high (7 grade levels ahead?) unless they have the ability. If he didn't have the ability, the math videos on Khan Academy and Dreambox lessons wouldn't make any sense to him. DS had a higher score for math than DD's spring score (in terms of the raw score)...she is placed in pre-algebra and DS is stuck in second grade math. He has to jump over the "ability" hurdle in order to get the same opportunities. It seems nonsensical. If we allow him to take the CogAT he will probably do fine on the math section assuming I can teach him how to color in little bubbles and he doesn't space out. I have no idea about the verbal section.

Accommodations for writing responses directly in test booklet?

I don't know--I thought we had time to change his IEP but we don't have much time...they are testing much earlier than I thought. And I wouldn't even know who to email about this. The district is so dysfunctional.