Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment How to score similarities section on WISC

Yes! The fun part is how fascinatingly unique each person is, which can sometimes be highlighted by standard tasks, but certainly isn't limited to them.

And to the question of item tryout: these tests are actually pretty rigorously designed. The point of all the nonstandard responses we've been discussing (that might or might not be formally credited), is that highly nonstandard children generated them. The test is just one tool for understanding the child, which is why good evaluators always interpret the test results in the light of the whole child. (Which is also why, btw, for all that I can contribute some of my thoughts on test interpretation, anything I present is just an hypothesis to be tested against what is known about the child IRL.)

Your comments in this forum are very impressive and have clearly been of great value to many. If only all professionals in your field were of similar calibre.

It was a frustrating experience to watch my eldest being tested at age 3. I had a strong urge to shred her assessment report and only refrained because the IQ estimate did support early school entry which had been the main aim of the exercise. The psychologist who reassessed her at age 9, and also assessed DS at age 4, was exceptional. Her verbal comments vividly stand out in my memory, including that she was sure DS’s quantitative reasoning (the section for which his percentile estimate was lowest) was an underestimate. At 15, as she predicted, he is an exceptional mathematician. He even has a paid job performing quality checks of mathematics resources. Not only has he picked up errors in draft answers which Uni students have missed, he value adds by editing questions to eliminate ambiguity (which often would only be perceived by someone with knowledge beyond the level of the material) which is technically not within the scope of the job’s requirements, but somewhat relevant to this thread.

EM, how wonderful that your DS has the opportunity to use his math gifts in this way, especially as he is seeing, tangibly and early, that they have value in multiple contexts!

And yes, a lot depends on the clinical skills of the evaluator, which is, of course, why in-person one-to-one assessment is still considered the gold standard. (Now ask me how my profession feels about developments in assessment practices resulting from the advent of remote learning!)

One of the things that is so tricky about this, is that I now know we should never have been allowed in the room when during the testing with that first psychologist. But had I not been, I would not have been aware of SO many red flags (which were confirmed by her report). She seemed quite unaware of the ways she was impacting my child's mood and behavior. Had completely forgotten various events. One subtest my child had completed the entire subtest perfectly in the allocated time. She actually said out loud "I've never seen that before!". Which was a worry in itself, on multiple levels. But also, when the report came and the score for that subtest was 17, I was curious. I called and asked, she had no memory of any of it until prompted (but did then recall, and so was curious herself and went and looked it up, and confirmed that it had been a "perfect" score, but was scaled due to age). This seems like an appropriate time to note in the report that a 17 was the ceiling score due to age (I have various other reports with notes of precisely this nature).

Because I had inappropriately been allowed to sit in the room, I was very certain we needed to try again with someone more experienced with gifted children.

Just last night I was discussing with my child's psychologist how worried everyone had been about therapy by zoom/skype etc, but how wonderful they had found it. That there had been so much benefit from seeing the child in their own environment. But we did discuss that testing was obviously very tricky remotely!

So, then I shall ask... have you yet administered a test / assessment remotely by videoconference?

I have not, and still feel quite ambivalent about embarking on it, should I be called upon to do so. The entire field is in a quandary about teleassessment (as distinct from teletherapy), because very few (that is, none) of the gold standard instruments have been properly validated in this format, and the few instruments that were designed for teleassessment aren't among the stronger ones. The available data on teleassessment also is based on proctored formats, with trained proctors, because the original idea was to increase access to specialists in remote or rural locations--which were presumed to at least have teachers--not to evaluate people in their homes, with all kinds of distractions, possible spoiling of responses one way or the other, and untrained family members as the likely only available proctors. Not to mention inconsistencies and inequities in access to reliable internet.

On the pro side would be pragmatism. If at some point this becomes the only way we can conduct evaluations, then there may be situations where incomplete or flawed data is better than none.

I did find it hard to imagine how tele-assessment would work successfully. I hope you & your colleagues can develop appropriate ways to get through/round these restrictions.