Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Finally got the full report/scores

"Are there any other good educational videos? I'd love to show him nature programs, but for some reason people seem to think the most interesting thing animals do is mate and we have not had that conversation yet."

Highly recommend the BBC series' Planet Earth and Life, the ones with David Attenborough narrating. Planet Earth 2 is out now, but we haven't seen it. They are great especially on BluRay on an HDTV, and you not only see the magnificence of nature, you learn about how things grow, interact, change. Life does have mating rituals but ultimately it's by topic and shows plants, birds, oceanic life, and so forth, and isn't really focused on reproduction.

A few thoughts:

1. I agree that it would be interesting to see if his other WISC verbal subtests were more similar to the higher score or the lower score, but I think you already have information in that area, in the form of the CELF-5 results, which are generally consistent with the VCI, with a core language index identical to the VCI, and individual test scores across the same range as the VCI subtests (from Average up to the beginning of the Extremely High range--though on the CELF, these typically would be described only as Average and Above Average). Your observation on the relationship between Similarities and Word Classes is generally accurate, though the big difference is that there is no expressive language requirement for WC. Students only have to identify the words that go together, not describe how two provided words are related. The two tasks he did particularly well on on the CELF both derive significant benefit from his exceptional working memory.

2. I think Coding may have benefited from his memory as well. Typically, students of this age look up and down between the key and the response rows. Memorizing them quickly saved him a lot of time, and reduced any possible effects from getting "lost" while scanning up and down. I wonder a bit if that (scanning) was a factor in his lower SS score.

3. On another note, SaturnFan, I imagine that you may have considered that you yourself might be 2e? And -because- of that, much more capable of teaching the child that you know better than anyone else does than you might think.

Longcut: I'm pretty sure Planet Earth is on netflix, so I will start previewing that tonight. Not sure about Life, but I will look into it as well, thanks

aeh: As usual everything you say clarifies things a lot

1. It makes perfect sense that the CELF scores back up his WISC verbal score. He did get a 13 on Word Classes vs. an 11 on Similarities, which isn't a huge difference, but could reflect possible greater difficulty with expressive language. One thing that is difficult to account for is his medication situation at the time of testing. He was unmedicated (more accurately meds wearing off) for much of the CELF and some of the OT stuff, but he was fully medicated for the IQ test as I recall. This ended up being the case because we did the cognitive testing in the am and most of the other testing after school so that he would miss less class time (DS is only medicated for the hours he is at school). The lady giving the CELF said she has never had another student get all the way to the end and get every item correct on Following Directions, but she could not give him credit for a bunch of them as she had to repeat the directions (because he was not listening the first time). I was actually in the room for much of the CELF to help manage behavior.

2. I definitely think the Symbol Search result was accurate. DS loves board games and card games, but there is one game he has always hated and does terribly at: Scene It. We gave the game away years ago because he refused to play it at all. OTOH, he can beat all of us at SET, which is a visual and speed based game as well. As far as coding goes, maybe the fact that he wrote so slowly and perfectly made up for the time he saved by memorizing the key and his score ended up being a good indicator of his ability anyway? Overall I'm not especially worried about processing speed, DS seems to be a pretty quick thinker for the most part (except he sometimes is slow to formulate responses or follow through on directions).

3. I don't know that I have any special intellectual ability myself. I was labeled borderline MR and ADD in elementary school and shipped off to the IU to be educated. I got a poor education there because most of the kids had academic challenges and there was a lot of disruptive behavior in the classroom. I did get to be top of the class for academics and behavior though (I still have all of my two dollar bills and awards for grades and behavior). When I finally got out of special ed I was pretty far behind, but by 11th grade I excelled at writing and I qualified for a program where I got to go to the local community college for 12th grade based on my verbal SAT score (my 530 on math almost kept me out of the program, but they made an exception because my verbal was so high). I ended up loving college and graduated with honors (so pretty sure my IQ results way back when were wrong). I was good at art, writing, music composition, poetry, history, sociology, psych, and science. Mostly I was the opposite of DS! I read very fast and DS reads sooo slooow. But so does his dad (who was ID'd gifted and who is amazing at math and programming, I swear he thinks in formulas). I've never considered myself to be especially intelligent though and I can't do the amazing stuff DS can do. I don't have any working memory to speak of, if you list 3 numbers I'll forget the 2nd and 3rd trying to recall the first. But I am a fast thinker. I may not be good at math, but I can calculate what 6% off would be was faster than DS's father can and just today his dad was determining what portion of our med dose to send into school and I told him 17 plus one to offset rounding and he took over 5 minutes to determine that 18 was the right number to send. I keep trying to explain to him that I am bad at math calculations, not bad at thinking! He kept asking how I could have figured it out so fast. I kept wondering how he could have taken 5 minutes to figure it out! I do think we all have some pretty weird brains in this family!

Back in the day, ADHD was called minimal brain dysfunction, which I think captured some aspects of the profile fairly accurately, but also gave people the mistaken impression that people with this kind of cognitive style weren't truly educable. (In some communities, institutionalizing persons with ADHD was a serious consideration.) I suspect that the lack of access to quality math instruction, on top of a likely untreated math disability (dyscalculia), probably kept your math achievement lower than it could have been. I bet you're better at math than you think you are.

And not just in your family!

Well, we had the meeting last week and I've spent some time processing it. I learned that the gifted services include twice a (6 day) cycle pullouts where DS will get to do fun projects that are supposed to challenge him. Other than that the teacher will be differentiating in the classroom. I did ask what they would do for math since DS has pretty much mastered 2-5 math (the school is grades 2-5)... they said it was a good question but that they don't have an answer right now. They offered OT consult of 15 minutes per month (we upped it to 30) and a social skills pullout with peers with similar needs. They were also very pleasant and seemed quite willing to work with us. They said how much they enjoyed DS and how polite and kind he was during the testing. Oh, and they also wrote up a section on using keyboarding and dictation to show knowledge in subject areas due to his difficulty with planning and producing written work. Overall we were very happy with the meeting and with the district.

That said, I am concerned about differentiation within the classroom, especially if the general ed teacher is in charge of it. I can see it would be all too easy to not do enough, even if intentions are good. And I am very concerned about math instruction, not because I care a lot about math progress, but because DS really wants to push himself in math and very much hates practicing mastered skills. We did discuss him using Khan Academy at school to do what he wants during math class, or even just letting him do code.org during math and get any additional math instruction he wants at home. The fun projects they proposed for him to do over the course of the year in the gifted pull out seemed pretty easy for DS. There were only two and one of them was the zones of the ocean and what lives there, a topic he was into and exhausted a few years ago. I let them know he would rather do chemical bonding/electron shells or genetics and heritability or something related to space. They seem willing to consider our suggestions at least. Overall, I think maybe we could make it work?

OTOH, DS is so happy at his gifted school and wants to go again next year. Unfortunately as he is moving up to the next class and his 2 friends are not. I am concerned about him going into the school year with no friends in his actual class. He will see them at lunch and recess though. Obviously we don't much care for the cost of gifted school either. But lately I have been in heated arguments with them on two very important issues: Academic and behavioral.

First off, they want us to continue with his aide next year as a condition of his attendance and we can't get the insurance to pay for the aide unless he shows need. Which we can't show if he can't attend without the aide. He has an aide now, but all data shows he doesn't really need one. He is not engaging in behaviors that warrant insurance covering the service. Which is good. But also causing us a problem, obviously. His current authorization is up at the end of the school year and I have already been informed he will not qualify for the 1:1 service anymore. The school wants us to consider paying out of pocket for 1:1 support. This on top of tuition is so unreasonable for us that we just lolled at the idea.

Issue number 2 is academics. I have stated here many times that the school refuses to budge on writing requirements and that DS really struggles in this area. Just yesterday he came home upset and told me he was supposed to do a writing assignment and he couldn't even get started because it was too hard. I talked to him about the basics of a story and how to do an outline and gave him some ideas for how I would write a story using the given criteria. He asked me to open up google docs and he dictated to me a very well thought out story in under 5 minutes. It was actually quite clever and creative. I sent it to his teacher and she had him share it with the class today and his classmates really enjoyed it. I think this makes it obvious that he can do the written work with a little support, he just can't be creative and perform the motor skills at the same time, it's too much for him. He has nice handwriting, they do HWT, we practice functional writing at home (notes for dad, thank you notes, greeting cards, etc.) I just can't see why DS if forced to write out every worksheet answer at school in addition to being unable to show his composition talents because he has to physically write everything down. Grrr.

And item number 2 academically is that, while they won't give him a break on writing, they won't accelerate him as much as he wants in math! They have him doing 3rd grade Beast Academy (which he already completed over a year ago when we homeschooled grade K) and he just started (at my insistence) 4th grade in Khan Academy. They keep saying they base his placement on his MAP score, but his MAP score is 230, well above 3rd grade! They keep tellin me performance at home and at school are often different and that even if he is doing higher level stuff at home he is not able to transfer the skills to school. I didn't know math was a skill that was difficult to transfer? Oh, and that 160 on his WIAT probably means something too. I'm getting very frustrated as I'm being treated like a parent who doesn't understand the real science that they are basing his math placement off of. Ironically he gets a special math pullout where he has learned calculus basics, early algebra, higher level stuff with fractions, etc. But he doesn't go to that class every day and is stuck practicing math basics when doing math in the classroom. How can they teach him 7th grade stuff if one class, but say he is at 3rd grade in another? I'm hesitant to even have him take the spring MAP as it takes him days to get through it and they don't even seem to use the data properly anyway. Oh, and DS is complaining, otherwise I wouldn't care one bit. I don't like sending my kid to expensive private gifted school and still get complaints math and science are boring/too easy!

So obviously we have a difficult decision to make. Some aspects of his current school are wonderful and won't be replicated at public school. How this particular public school will handle him is also a complete unknown at this point. I just wanted to update anyone who was following our story and also reiterate how thankful I am for all of the helpful advice. I'd go crazy without this board and all of the help I have received over the past year!

Edit: I just remembered, I had asked about additional testing due to verbal discrepancy and the tester said that similarities was the first test she administered to him and she feels that he wasn't really on board with the testing at that point. She thinks there is a good chance that it is low for that reason. Obviously this answer gets the district out of doing any additional testing, but if this is the reason it is low there may not actually be that big of a discrepancy after all. I had asked if there was anything I could do with him at home to tap into the skill that is being measured on the test to see if he struggles with it, but she couldn't think of anything. Is there some online resource or subject workbook that would use these same skills (or just questions I could ask), specifically something that is by age so that I can see if DS is performing above agemates? I want to make it clear that I don't want to practice the skills for the purpose to increasing scores, just assess where he is at to see if he is weak in this stuff. For instance, I know that DS is terrible at find the difference pictures or what's wrong with this picture type challenges, but I don't force him to practice these skills so that he will excel at them in case they are ever on some test. It's all about finding out for sure if the low similarities score is accurate or not.

After reading and reflecting a bit, here are some thoughts...

If I understand correctly, your post weighed PROs and CONs of two schools... the first, a public school, based on a recent meeting... the second, a private school, based on your son's experiences so far this school year.
- Has your son shadowed at the public school?
- Have you reviewed and printed your State laws and school policies for gifted education?
- Are you familiar with wrightslaw, a great source of information on disability?
- I'll just add the advocacy roundup here, too.

Public School
gifted pullout:
social - A great benefit of the gifted pull-out may be for a child to be in the company of academic/intellectual peers (or near as, depending upon the mix of kids which the school has to offer as peers). That said, a child would need to have the social skills to leverage this opportunity and make a connection with these academic/intellectual peers.
academic - What would he miss in the regular classroom at this time? Fun, challenging projects during two pull-outs of unspecified length each 6-day cycle sound like a very weak "gifted" program or service. Especially if only two topics are offered, and your child exhausted one of them years ago. You might wish to follow-up to see if you get a firm commitment from the school to expand offerings to include projects in chemical bonding/electron shells or genetics/heritability or something related to space.

As for differentiation in the classroom, you may wish to ask some gently probing questions as to what your son's experience would consist of.

Because the school only goes up to grade 5 and does not presently have an answer as to what math differentiation would consist of, you might want to follow-up on the school's response to your suggestions of Khan Academy and/or code.org, and get a firm commitment on logistics. Would attending the local middle school for math be up for discussion?

The OT consult of 30 minutes per week and social skills pullout with other children having similar needs appear to address 2e needs or deficits, not gifted/talented strengths. Do you also teach and reinforce social skills at home?

Private School
social - A child's happiness at school is an important factor. That said, does he understand that he will not be in class with his 2 buddies next year? When you say he is moving up to the next class and his 2 friends are not... do you mean he is skipping a grade... or his friends are repeating a grade?
academic - Although you mention that your son is happy at his school, you also mention that he reports that math and science are too easy.

Is it possible that in insisting on an aide for next year as a condition of your son's attendance, while also taking steps to preclude financial assistance by your insurance company, the school is establishing circumstances contrived to inspire your family to place your son elsewhere?

If the school refuses to budge on writing requirements, is this possibly indicative of a poor school fit?

In light of the discrepancy between your son's level 3/4 math placement and level 7 math enrichment pullout, you may wish to have further discussion with the school regarding the MAP score, your son's placement, and performance expectations.

School Fit
A small roundup of links on school fit:
- School consultant for elementary aged child
- What kids don't learn
- Roundup of Tamara Fisher blog posts
- Article about poor school fit (includes findings by Miraca Gross)
- roundup of links on "educational fit"
- roundup of discussion threads on full-grade acceleration (pro and con)
- advanced curriculum with same-aged intellectual peers

Applying for your child to join the Davidson Young Scholars (DYS) may be advantageous; If your son becomes a DYS you may be able to gain some additional advocacy support/information.

Lastly, be aware that with extensive data collection and the Longitudinal Student Database, schools may readily review your child's records from other schools.

Thank you Indigo, for helping me clarify my concerns/pros and cons and for the helpful links.

I do have to say I can't see DS in a middle school for anything. He is a rather small 7 year old, only 45 pounds, and with no awareness of his surroundings. I think he would get trampled and not even notice it happening! The middle school is also a distance from the elementary school, so it would involve bussing and missing extra class time. I can't see it being a feasible option right now.

As far as his two friends go, they are both in K and will stay in the K-1 classroom for 1st grade next year. They will be in class together again the following year in the 2-3 class. The whole class was only 5 kids this year (later 6) and there was only one other boy in 1st grade and he and DS really clashed. The 2 girls are both the type who have no interest in a very adhd kid like my DS (quiet and studious types). But maybe some of the current 2nd graders or some new students would appeal to DS as friends next year? Right now the class size is looking like 6 again per 2/3 classroom, so out of 12 kids hopefully they group them so that DS is in with a likely friend.

As far as DYS application goes, I have been considering it, but I'm a little hesitant to send in the entire 36 page evaluation report including all of DS's medical information. I did ask the school psych if she would be able to type up a report with just the cognitive and academic testing for the purposes of applying to special programs and she said she will need to ask if that is permitted and get back to us. Otherwise I guess I just send in the book of DS? It says no pages can be missing, but can I ask them to only look at the relevant pages?

DITD are absolute tigers about their privacy policy, and I'm not sure DD's consultant even knows what was in her application. The information is certainly not going to be disseminated outside the DITD, and my guess is probably not outside the admissions committee. You could probably email them and ask about privacy before you apply and get the straight story from them. But I would try not to let this dissuade you from applying.

While a child's relatively smaller size may be an issue for some in keeping an accelerated child from mingling with kids 3 years older, I would only see "no awareness of his surroundings" as the show-stopper. The transportation logistics also appear to present an impasse. Do the schools have technology to facilitate distance learning, such as participation in the middle-school-level math class via skype, etc?

In my observation and experience, DITD is very respectful of privacy and does not share info. Personally, I would feel confident sharing the full report with DITD for the DYS application.