Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Any WISC IV insights for academic achievement?

Well, I'm feeling incredibly foolish right now. In pulling together records for a meeting with an educational consultant tomorrow, I found WIAT III achievement test results. I don't know that we and the school ever really discussed these, and I don't know why we've since only really looked at the IQ and classroom observation reports!

For what it's worth, this was done at the same time as the WISC IV above; 3 years ago at age 9. I haven't thought through the results at all, and how they may or may not provide any insight. I hope to learn more at tomorrow's intake meeting; if anyone has any additional insights, please do ring in!

What pops out of the examiner's summary is that s/he "does not think that his final [writing] production is a true indication of his overall writing skills. Of concern, however, is how [he] reacted to the task and became so 'stuck' that it impacted his performance.
:-(
I think we've made some progress on this front but it doesn't feel like he's where he should be.

TOTAL READING Standard Score (SS) 133; 99 %ile; Superior
Basic Reading SS 130; 98 %ile; High Average[/b]
Word Reading SS 135; 99 %ile; Superior
Pseudoword Decoding SS 115; 84 %ile; Average
Reading Comprehension and Fluency SS 130; 98 %ile; High Average
Reading Comprehension SS 128; 97 %ile; High Average
Oral Reading Fluency SS SS 124; 95 %ile; High Average

MATHEMATICS SS 145; 99.9 %ile; Superior
Numerical Operations SS 135; 99 %ile; Superior
Math Problem Solving SS 151; 99.9 %ile; Very Superior
Math Fluency SS 117; 87 %ile; High Average

WRITTEN EXPRESSION SS 101; 53 %ile; Average
Spelling SS 115; 84 %ile; Average
Sentence Composition SS 89; 23 %ile; Average
Essay Composition SS 104; 61 %ile; Average

ORAL LANGUAGE SS 146; 99.9 %ile; Very Superior
Listening Comprehension SS 144; 99.8 %ile; Superior
Oral Expression SS 142; 99.7 %ile; Superior

No worries. You're trying to track a pretty extensive collection of information. Believe me, I've been known to forget that I gave the test, let alone received results from someone else!

Other than writing, his achievement scores are very, very good, and correspond quite well with his cognitive profile.

At this distance, we probably can't pin down for sure everything that led the examiner to state that this was a low estimate of writing skills, but I think we have some good ideas. Handwriting probably fed into frustration over the writing tasks, especially those of sentence-length or longer. (Spelling appears unaffected.) I have seen "stuck" have pretty significant effects on Sentence Composition before; I would imagine he refused to complete some of the items in the sentence building portion of the subtest, because he didn't know where to start from. If the other half of the subtest scored well, that would be a pretty good indication that the underlying writing skills were more-or-less intact, even though his formal overall subtest score was lower than expected. Even so, the extended writing task (Essay Composition) is a little lower than I would have liked to see. I don't know how much of that reflects a high-quality, but overly brief, response, as those component scores are not presented here (though they must exist somewhere!).

In any case, this mostly confirms what you already knew about his historical academic experience. I don't think it changes his present substantially.