Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment this has always bugged me - WISC "comprehension"

So this has always bugged me. The Comprehension subtest in WISC IV is described as: "Comprehension: Items that require child to explain what should be done in certain circumstances, the meaning of proverbs, why certain societal practices are followed, and so forth. The test measures practical judgment, common sense, and the ability to understand and adapt to social customs. Score on each item varies (0-2 pts) according to the degree to which the response describes the most pertinent aspects of the question."

DS7.5 took the WISC IV when he was 6. He went into extended norms on all three VCI subtests and scored a 23 on comprehension.

DS is the love of my life. But I have never seen anybody less able to "adapt to social customs." He probably has pretty good practical judgment and common sense under ideal circumstances. But those circumstances are pretty few and far between.

What gives? Is this just another reflection of immature executive function/prefrontal cortex? Should I have hope for future development of social savvy? Or did the test measure hypothetical understanding only - which doesn't necessarily translate into behavior.

Anyway - this just bugs me and I'm hoping there are experts out there who could explain.

Thanks!
Sue

This is how our neuropsych explained it to me. There's a difference between understanding it hypothetically and being able to do it in practice.

I usually describe the test as a measure of knowledge of social conventions, which has some overlap with social reasoning skills, but doesn't necessarily translate to strong social performance, especially on the fly. Being able to articulate what people usually do or think is not the same as being able to read actual people or navigate live social situations. It's a bit like being an anthropologist or animal behaviorist, studying the behavioral patterns of a population from the outside.

It is also highly culturally-laden, with assumptions/values relating to market economies, representative government, and other predominantly Anglo-American concepts.

What it has to do with intellectual ability is very similar to what vocabulary and information tasks have to do with intellect: a high cognitive person living in a certain environment is likely to acquire more of this type of knowledge than a lower cognitive person. It is a measure that correlates well psychometrically with intelligence, even though it is not so much a measure of "innate" reasoning ability.

I think the comprehension section was dropped on the VCI version of the WISC V. My DS8 was diagnosed with a pragmatic language impairment amd ADHD and scored in the 140s on the WISC IV VCI section. Apparently there is a difference between verbal reasoning and real world social reasoning.

Yes. Comprehension is a supplementary subtest. The WISC-V uses only two subtests per cluster, which in the case of the VCI are the vocabulary and similarities subtests.

I overheard many of the questions in this section. It bugs me too. Just being in the car with NPR on the radio allowed my dd14 to answer some of the questions correctly. One of the questions was mentioned on this forum previously(has since been edited) and I was so tempted to talk about it with dd on the way to being tested. Decided not to for obv. reasons. I can also imagine my dd8 being like, "Oh, my mom just asked me this today!"

Has anyone noticed a gender difference in performance on this subtest? Just curious. Our tester made an interesting comment about this subtest and gifted boys vs. gifted girls...

Believe me, I find it quite tempting to discuss all of the items with my kids! (In reality, I've carefully avoided having any of them see or hear me administering or scoring WISCs, SBs, or WJs; they are sometimes hovering in the vicinity when I'm writing up an eval, though.) I'm sure, if we ever have any of them evaluated, the examiner will take one look at the family intake and discount all of their scores right off the bat!

The idea, though, is that the majority of children living in the USA might have comparable environmental access to this information, and that most children would not have retained the tidbits from NPR.

I haven't really seen (anecdotally) a marked gender difference, over hundreds of examinees. And the standardization data don't reflect one, either. That might not apply to outliers, of course.

I'd kill to know what the questions are, because I'll bet they're incredibly culturally biased. When one of my kids was very young they were in a study which required me to fill out a survey of their spoken vocabulary. The list was of 100 words, and one of them was "dish". Which, outside of that one nursery rhyme, is not a word I've ever ever used in my life. My one year old certainly didn't know it!