Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Some help from experts on WISC-V scores

My daughter is 7.5 years old and has always been a bright young girl with some empathy and anger issues. She is a September baby but we pushed her and she is in second grade as basically the youngest child. We did not think that she was ever gifted until one teacher told us to go have her evaluated. What we got from the scores and from the psychologist who gave it confuses us and hopefully someone here can help.

Full Scale IQ 127 96 Superior

Verbal Comprehension Index 108 70th Average
Visual Spatial Index 122 93rd High Average
Fluid Reasoning Index 123 94th Superior
Working Memory index 117 87th High Average
Processing Speed Index 141 >99th Very Superior

By definition she is not gifted as that would be 130. However, the psychologist said that her PSI was off the charts and that he has not seen someone that high in a long time. He said that he also has never seen anyone finish it so fast and only get one wrong which he said was a subtle error (she had time remaining on the clock). He explained that if she spent 30 more seconds on doing things that she would be way over 130, but that her "brain is not letting her slow down". He also noted that she only scored low on the Vocabulary part (50%) of VCI and not the Similarities part (84%) which he said will change when she trains herself to learn what some words mean.

This actually fits in well with what her teachers have always told us in that she is the first to finish everything by 15 - 20 minutes ahead of the class, she reads on a 4th grade level but does not always understand everything she reads.

Is this normal? Has anyone seen this or heard of this? Is this something where we should focus with her on this and get her to take this test or a different one again in a few months?

She acts out at school and does have some issues and we have always felt it was somehow related to boredom.

I think that aeh can best explain the significance of your DD's scores. I can tell you, however, that my DD10, like yours, had a high PSI on the WISC, but a somewhat lower WMI (your DD actually has both a higher PSI, as well as a higher WMI). In real life, DD is quick to learn, but impatient.

One challenge that I have wondered about is whether DD's mind is impatient with repetition, but may SOMETIMES need it because of her lower WMI. In my DD's case, however, I think that her high reasoning abilities help her often work quickly and accurately. Also, she seems to remember things not by rote, but by the connections she makes (she has a very curious mind). Still, as she encounters the need to digest more and more information as she moves through school, I predict that she will eventually need to learn to develop her memory to do her best at certain tasks. Right now, she almost never studies (which I do not think is a good thing).

I have actually seen similar profiles before. Keeping in mind that she is still young, and not yet in the range where IQs are considered more stable, a reasonable interpretation of her current scores is that she is in the Superior/Very High range with respect to nonverbal skills (an excellent range, as it is high enough to be at the top of the class, but usually in the range for schools to accommodate more readily), but in the High Average range in verbal reasoning. I would guess that her High Average working memory may have resulted from a higher visual memory and a slightly lower auditory memory (though both were probably fine), based on her reasoning scores. Her speed is indeed exceptionally high, but is based on primarily rote tasks, which tends not to be as good a predictor of learning ability for novel and problem-solving tasks. (The FRI is the best predictor of that.)

Your reports of her classroom performance are quite consistent with her learning profile, as one would expect her to be very efficient with learned tasks (including decoding words and completing one-step calculations), but likely weakest in language comprehension. That she decodes at a fourth-grade level, is able to reason verbally in the High Average range, but has vocabulary only in the middle of the Average range suggests that she may actually be reading too quickly, and without sufficient reflection to make the verbal connections that would allow her to pick up vocabulary from context. In addition, a child of this age with higher verbal reasoning usually picks up more vocabulary than this from oral language.

It is quite possible that the behavior issues at school are related to boredom, but they may also be related to a gap between her language comprehension and her nonverbal reasoning. Do you have standardized achievement testing on her? Such as data on reading comprehension and math problem solving?

Thanks for this info! We don't have any testing on her for that yet. I can tell you that she just started doing long division and computer programming by herself which is a bit beyond the rest of her grade. With reading, you are spot on. She flies through books and her recall is great in that if I ask her for a summary she can explain page by page what happened, but she can't summarize it in a few sentences.

Do you think that her PSI is just bringing everything else up?

I wouldn't say that her PSI is actually bringing everything else up, but it may be confounding assessment of her actual rate of learning with the pace of work completion.

I do want to note that, even if her "actual" rate of learning is not technically GT, she is still clearly a bright little person, capable of functioning beyond her nominal grade level. If you consider how a typical classroom is designed, the expectation is that students will largely fall within one standard deviation of the mean, ranging from the low end of average (about the 16th %ile) to the high end of average (about the 84th %ile). Functionally, this encompasses about a half grade level below nominal grade level, up to about a half grade above. A child above the 90th %ile (who is often probably a grade level above) thus falls outside of the differentiated instruction range for which standard textbooks plan, and will need more than the teacher normally provides--even though 98th %ile is where the GT classification formally kicks in in most places. So a nominally non-GT child may very well need GT-type planning.

All this to say, the specific numbers are not as important as whether your child is happy, engaged, and optimally challenged. If she needs more academically to reach that point, which side of the cutoff she falls on is not the critical question.

Thank you again, this is very helpful. I am curious, are there any other tests that would make sense to be given to her? Also, at what age is IQ a bit more stable (looking back at your earlier messages) and should we have her take a second test?

Quick thought with respect to reading comprehension: do you still have her read out loud to you? And do you read out loud to her? It's easy when you have a great reader to let them go independent, but reading together is a great way to slow down and talk though all the new vocabulary and concepts, rather than her skipping over them.

A sneaky add-on is switching which parent's turn it is to read each night - thus requiring the child to summarize what the parent missed the previous evening. For your DD, perhaps you could try asking for the most important thing(s) that happened, rather than a detailed summary?

I don't mean to hijack this thread but aeh, what you wrote is eye opening! Do you have any sources you could share? DS (99 %ile) is bored silly but the school keeps spitting out the line "the classroom teachers differentiate to each child's level ... so his needs are being met".

Yes, this has been a problem. We did let her read alone for the last year and this is likely related. We now sit with her again when she reads out loud to us and we have her write down any words she does not know in a journal (which has helped). However, the problem still remains with her speed (and we keep saying slow down). I learned how to speed-read in high school and it was really helpful in college, but she speed reads by actually reading all the words out loud (reads a mile a minute).

I like that idea of the most important thing as that seems like a really good approach.

Here's a nice graphic and summary that includes GT in the tiered system of supports. The exact percentages shift somewhat in different sources. While RTI (Response to Intervention) is usually discussed in the context of struggling learners, it (statistically) applies equally to advanced learners:

http://www.cde.state.co.us/rti/LearnAboutRtI.htm

The important points to understand:

1. Tier 1, or core instruction, (AKA, the curriculum as presented by the textbook publisher) is expected to be sufficient for about 80% (70-90%) of the school population. This is as far as classroom teachers generally can differentiate.

2. Another 5-15% will be successful with some moderately different additional programming or supports. Perhaps extension assignments here and there, or a once a week pull-out enrichment period. A few of these kinds of support may be manageable by the teacher, inside a general classroom, using, say flexible or leveled groupings. Some textbook publishers do include supplementary materials that address the needs of some of these students, especially those closer to that middle 80%, and a few exceptional teachers are able to provide this level of support in their large classrooms.

3. 1-5% will need substantially more modification in their programming. It is unrealistic to expect typical classroom teachers to be equipped to provide these services.

Tamara Fisher's excellent blog on the topic (http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/unwrapping_the_gifted/2009/08/rti_and_the_gifted.html) notes that a double ended RTI pyramid looks much like the bell curve, such that the top 2.5% need intensive instructional modification as much as the bottom 2.5% do--both are equally out of the range of tier 1 classroom instruction.

So just as RTI for struggling learners recognizes that classroom teachers cannot differentiate for the needs of the lowest 10 to 15% without assistance, it is unrealistic (and unfair) to expect teachers to be able to differentiate easily for the top 10% (let alone the top 1%). They have not been provided the tools to do so.