Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Ambivalence?

Hi All,

I've been frantically busy the last three months, so I'm sorry to say that I haven't been contributing at all. But I've still been lurking a bit. Now with a little extra time I wonder if I could get some feedback from the collective wisdom of the board.

As DS4 approaches 4.5, we're starting to think a bit more about evaluation issues. Mainly we're interested in having good information on the basis of which to make decisions about his education. To some extent too, though, I think we just want to know what kind of situation we're dealing with.

That said, I find myself incredibly ambivalent about the idea of IQ testing, and I wonder whether anyone else has felt like this too. There are lots of aspects to my ambivalence, but one main one comes from imagining how I will respond when we get the results. I strongly suspect that if the results coincide what I already think, then I'll take them as confirmation of my gut instinct. But if they come back lower than I expect then I don't imagine I'll take that as disconfirmation of my gut instinct. Instead, I imagine I'll start looking for reasons that the test might not have reflected DS's real abilities. This seems like a weird asymmetry - a kind of heads I win, tails the game was unfair kind of issue. It makes me wonder what I want the results for in the first place.

Has anyone else had this worry?

BB

baseballdad,
I'm right there with you. A bit new to the forum myself, I wish I would have found it years ago. DD5 started K this year, I of course new she was too advance for the class, but didn't have her tested until her teacher suggested it.

They did a "Brigance Comprehensive Inventory of Basic Skills" This does not give an IQ but it does let you know what grade level your child is at. Example, My daughter is a 5th grade level reading, begining 2nd grade math (although that was a month ago and now she knows most of her times tables including how to do more than 3 numbers and division which is 3rd grade)

Anyway It gives you an ideal were he's at and what to discuss with the teachers on why type of work they will give him. If you have it done before you put him in school it will also give you a chance to make sure the school is going to be a fit for him.

We wont be testing any time soon... but i do often worry about my motives and think to my self if being gifted makes life harder on my child shouldnt i hope they are NOT gifted...

the only answer i can come up with is i know my daughter is different or strange in someways you could even call it quirky and i think i would like a diagnoses so i know how to help her become who she needs to be and when you know your child is different in some ways that doesnt change because of a low test score so knowing what you know about your own kid of course you would keep searching for the answer exspecialy because the tests are off a bit quite often


Edit~~~~ the reason we wont be testing anytime soom is because we will be homeschooling our kids i was homeschooled for six years as a child and have decided its what is best for us i may have them tested further down the line... i do keep my kids involved in activitys with other kids and socialize them too though

Here's my story: DS7 (then 5.5) was IDd by his K teacher as GT and was tested by the school. Now, I knew he was bright, and I figured he was MG. So when they ID'd him, I didn't even bother to go in and look at his test scores. They just send a "He's IDd" letter--no scores. He had a good K year, and they handled the GTness issue without my having to advocate. So who needs scores, right?

Then when he had major trouble in an undifferentiated 1st grade class, I went to see his scores on the WJ-3 (achievement test) and nearly dropped my teeth. He was 1-2 standard deviations higher than I had expected (and I had expected GT!): technically PG, not the MG I had expected!

It made sense though, once I read up. He was operating 3-7 grades above level pretty much across the board. (The areas requiring speed were lower--only 1-ish grades above level.) That's not MG!

So now what?

We decided to have him tested with the SB-5, and on a bad test day (getting sick and short of 2-3 hours of sleep) with a test that didn't suit him (as we had thought it would), he didn't test as well as the very experienced GT tester thought he should. The psych recommended that we test again on the WISC in a few months. But should we, we dithered?

After the SB-5, I had a major GTness crisis. before I saw the WJ-3 scores, I had thought DS was middling smart. Then I did some more reading and thought that the test was right and I had been in GT denial thanks in part to being surrounded by lots of GT friends and family members. Then we got the SB-5, and it seemed to say that he was closer to what I had thought initially. So confusing! While I wanted the support of DYS if DS was really qualifying, I didn't want to chase the score.

So we went back and forth about whether to re-test or not, but ultimately decided that because the in-the-know psych had recommended it, we should.

We waited a few months and tested in town on the WISC with a different psych, and DS had a much better test day. Plenty of sleep, no illness budding. And surprise! His scores on that test left no doubt in the mind of the tester or in my mind that DS was qualified for DYS. I decided that the SB-V and my belief that he was MG (before I knew about LOGs) were the anomalous data points, not the WISC and the WJ-3.

Quite a journey! And, yes, I guess I accepted the "heads I win, tails you lose" aspect of the testing. But I think the point of testing is to try to find a context in which to place what a child can do. As long as you're critical of the results you get, as long as you remember that none of these tests are designed to test the tails, and as long as you recognize that any test is a snapshot of one moment in time, not a comprehensive judgement on your child--who will be different tomorrow!--then I think testing is a good idea.

From testing, we learned that our particular public school wasn't going to be a good fit, mainly because they would not make the necessary accomodations DS would require. We also learned that he's deep, but not fast. That was important because it led us to decide not to put him into the private GT school yet, as I fear that he would be unable to keep up with the speed of the assignments even as he was bored with level of complexity, though I hope that as he matures and works on speed, we can revisit that decision. It also affects that way that I teach him--I know now that he's not dawdling, it's just how he is, and we have to adjust for it and work on it as surely as if he had an LD.

Without the testing, we wouldn't have known these things, and his education would be far less productive and happy than it is right now. We'd *ALL* be a lot less happy! Testing was very useful to us.

My take: knowledge is power. Testing is one source of knowledge. Take it where you can get it!

FWIW...

Thanks so much for the thoughts. I guess when I think hard about it I think that two real benefits, or possible benefits anyhow, are pragmatic: the scores themselves might help you to advocate and the way they are distributed might give you a better sense of what to advocate for. It sounds to me like both skylersmommy and Kriston have some version of these two points. I'm on board with both of those.

If I'm honest with myself, however, I wonder if my ambivalence has a different source. I feel completely certain that our kid is special - perhaps this is the kind of certainty that only a parent can have, but perhaps every parent has it, too. Despite this certainty, though, sometimes I wonder whether his is the kind of specialness that would be reflected in tests of the normal sort. In large part this is because of his range of behavior. Sometimes he does things that genuinely astonish me; if he were always that way I imagine he would do terrifically on any kind of test. But other times he is so off in his own world that simply getting him to recognize your existence is a Herculean task. His teachers have noticed it too. Whenever there is one kid missing from the line-up at the end of recess, they told us, they know immediately that DS has wandered off somewhere. Once they spent half an hour looking for him before they finally discovered him hiding in the inside of one of the big truck tires on the playground, happily singing to himself. He is in his own world quite a lot of the time. I have no doubt that it's a complicated and interesting world in there; and what peeks out of that world at times is part of what makes me think he's so special. But that kind of specialness seems like just the kind of thing a normal test is likely to miss.

When I said that my gut instinct is probably impervious to testing results, I guess what I was really thinking is that it's hard for me to imagine a test situation capturing what's special about our kid. Or maybe that's just another way of saying that GT isn't the relevant category. Oh dear, I'm so confused. Not knowing many other kids, the whole thing is so hard to understand.

BB

"Oh dear, I'm so confused"

LOL - me too! But I find that I fret much better if I have more information to fret about. Got to keep busy.

But seriously, I think if we hadn't done it we'd still be questioning ourselves (I mean, even more than we do anyway). When we headed into testing we did it on the quiet in case nothing showed up - we thought he was ready for the next grade up mostly (thought certainly not only) because he was the oldest.

I think you're expecting too much from the testing, BDad. It's a tool, not a way of summing up your whole child.

You have a very special, deep, interesting child there, and you're 100% right that no piece of paper or group of questions is going to capture all of that. So don't expect them to. Lower your expectations. (BTW, people here told me the same thing when I was considering testing. It was good advice! )

The nice thing about testing is you can take what you need from the results and let go of anything that seems anomalous. Testing is one piece of the puzzle that is your child, but it's not the whole puzzle. You are the expert! Testing is just one more thing to help you make sense of it all.

Thanks, folks. I feel like I've just been walked back from the edge.

Seriously, though, I like the advice from Kriston and BKD a lot. When you ratchet up the expectations for the testing then it can seem like it will never be able to provide what it should. But the right attitude then is just to ratchet down the expectations. Just because it won't tell you everything about your kid doesn't mean it won't tell you something.

Very sane.

I knew I could count on you guys...

BB

No one ever accused me of being sane, but I'm happy to help!

Ah, but you underestimate yourself...

BB