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

I was very nervous of testing our older one (5 at that time). I knew it was a useful tool but I didn't really want to do it. I didn't want to find out something I wasn't ready for. I kept asking myself what I would do if he tested lower than I expected. I kept asking myself what I would do if he tested higher than I expected and most important I kept asking what exactly was I expecting. Where would I place him on the curve? Was I even ready to make a guess? I wondered if I even had the right to know. It may sound weird but it was a real concerned for me.

I'd tried pushing the idea of testing out of my mind till the day when I had rather unpleasant discussion with my son's teacher who accused me of being a pushy parent and my son learning only to please me ... We had him test very soon after that. It was one of the best things we've ever done regarding him being gt. The results were a real eye opener. It was no longer surprising that the teachers had no idea what to do with him. It was also pretty obvious that it would be very hard to accommodate him in a regular school. It validated DS request to be homeschooled and it made the decision to do so so much easier. The results got him to Davidson and it stopped all the comments from the teachers. It was simply priceless.

The bottom line is I know how you feel. BTDT but I am extremely glad that DS6 was tested. We will test DS4 too, most likely once he turns 5. I do worry that his test may not really reflect him though. He can be pretty unreliable, sometimes answers questions wrong just to see what happens and when he is done with something he is done. Perhaps he will mature my then. I also know that I will struggle about what to do with 2 sets of numbers from my two kids. It will be hard not to compare and unless they both test the same there is really no good outcome.

We plan to test DS4, too. I'm hoping it will shed more light on just what's up with him. Honestly, I find myself at quite a loss, and I have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER how he'll score. When I casually described him the our psych, she said that it sounds like a 2E situation. I wouldn't be at all surprised, and I am really hoping that the testing will help me figure out what he needs. Right now, I'm really, really clueless! I'll take all the tools I can get!

Despite my alleged words of sanity, I think it will be very hard not to reduce DS4 to his test scores. Precisely because I am so clueless, I fear I'll take the testing as truth rather than as one bit of data from one day. Hopefully not...Forewarned is forearmed, right?

I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but I'm really happy to hear so many other stories of ambivalence. It seems to me that, although it's absolutely right and sane to think of testing as one piece of the pie, there really is a strong temptation in our world to treat it as the whole thing. (Mmm, pie. Must be holiday time.) Even if the parents manage to resist that temptation, the rest of the world may have a tougher time. This can have some good effects, I suppose; like in LMom's case when it stopped all the annoying comments from the teachers. But even so, making it possible for the world - and, heaven forbid, for yourself - to see your kid as a number seems dangerous.

Now, I have absolutely no doubt that one can learn important and interesting things from testing. And I think it would be a head-in-the-sand reaction simply to avoid it, since it seems obvious it can be so helpful. But it does seem a double-edged sword, and I guess that that's what this conversation is helping me understand better.

Keep the stories coming, please. It seems to me the best attitude is to recognize both the pros and the cons, and to manage the task of holding them in your mind simultaneously. It's like Odysseus preparing himself to listen to Sirens: you want to hear their song, but you don't want to be drawn to your death by it.

Hmmmm... you might also like to be prepared BaseballDad for all the questions the IQ testing will raise!!! In hindsight, I'm really disappointed that the testing told me so little. Sure, I got a number, but so many questions left unanswered... Sometimes I regret testing... So many cans; so many worms. And now I can't shove them all back in...

Just chiming in to support the last two posts--Dottie and Gratified really nailed it.

The tests today simply aren't made for these kids, so they're really being misapplied. It's just that they're all that we have, so we go with them. I have ranted about that in the past. Gratified's "flaky" is just the right word for them, I think! My dream is that someone will come up with a test specially designed JUST to test the tail of the curve. Wouldn't that be helpful! But right now, we just go with what we have.

And I love this paragraph:


So right!

Great help from everyone - thanks!

If truth be told I wonder, too, whether part of my ambivalence stems from something like my lack of certainty about where he stands in the first place. (Wow, I'm all over the map, aren't I!) I mean, I've read a lot of these stories in Gross, Ruf, et. al., and it's so hard to know what's normal and what's not. I guess I don't think he's straight ND, but where other than that he stands is so hard to tell.

For example, in our case although DS reads, he doesn't read the encyclopedia or Harry Potter; he reads normal, little chapter books like Frog and Toad. And even with those he likes to have us around to help with the odd word or even to alternate pages. He has been making a lot of strides in the last few weeks, and his desire to read things all on his own has increased. But he still prefers to read books he's read before over unfamiliar ones.

Similarly, although he likes numbers, and can calculate with them pretty well, his ability to think fluidly with them seems limited. For example, he likes puzzles and we play little number games together pretty often. Recently, though, it became clear that although he knew that 9+9=18, sometimes when you ask him what half of 18 is he gets stumped. Or again, he has known the three-series since he was two, but still if you ask him what 8x3 is he sometimes just doesn't seem to get it. Other times he does. It's confusing. You think he knows something and then you think he doesn't, and it makes you wonder whether your sense of him was right in the first place. Argh!

Furthermore, when he decides he's done thinking about something, then he's completely done, and it doesn't seem to bother him to have left the problem hanging in mid-air. You hear about these kids who are driven by a problem, and I'm not sure how much he is. He is curious, he asks questions - a lot of questions, often weird questions - but then when you try to help him figure out the answer he sometimes loses interest. (Maybe this is asking too much of a 4 year old - I am used to teaching much older kids. But I can't tell.) I don't have much by way of comparison, but I do take him to a little kind of numeracy class once a week. Some of the other kids there seem to have a bit more stamina, and occasionally things seem to come a bit quicker for them; the other kids are all six months to a year older than he is, though, and maybe this makes a difference at his age. Yet another thing I don't have a very clear sense of.

Oh dear, I guess I'm just venting. Well, apologies. I suppose this is the reason that testing might be appropriate. Maybe it will help us to understand at least some things better.

BB

Oops, cross-posted with Kriston. I suppose I should add, in light of hers and the previous two comments, that maybe the testing won't help us to understand much either. But as long as he's not too far into the tail...

Hi BBDad - we didn't think too much about iq tests before DS4 took his earlier this year. DH and I had him tested as a prerequisite for possible early kindy entrance. Having read Ruf's book, we figured he was at least a level 3, with some 4. I remember thinking "whew, at least he's not one of those profoundly gifted kids who have troubles with regular school." We went through a bit of shock after getting results that put him with that higher group. But now, I'm the positive that we have for getting him tested before school is that we are advocating ahead of time to make sure his needs will be met and he will be placed with the right kind of teacher.

But although we lucked out with DS getting a "magic number" first time round, most of the time he doesn't seem like a HG+ kid to me. As for reading harry potter, he could, but doesn't like to read much by himself, and he has a hard time with tracking all the lines unless he follows with his finger. DH and I do the majority of the reading. DS4 was however extremely happy to read a little star wars droid book to us by himself - i guess it's a matter of interest. If there were a giant chapter book on gonk droids, he'd be all over it!

And as for cooperating with testing, I was worried that DS wouldn't do the easier levels because once he's done something before, he isn't too interested in revisiting it. I think a little prep (e.g., telling DS that he had to do all the easy and silly questions or else he wouldn't get to the really fun ones) and a tester with experience with gifted kids made all the difference.

For me, one of the nice things about testing was learning about potential obstacles in DS's future education. Good to know in advance.

Good luck!

Very helpful, SPG. Just out of curiosity, what tests did you end up doing? Did you have any input, or did you just let the evaluator make the judgment?

BB

just a quickie, as I'm having a rough baby week...we had total ambivalence, too, and only tested, with trepidation, after a year of banging our heads on the school wall. It was a relief thinking we'd at least have some idea, ballpark, what we were dealing with, rather than wondering if the school read our son better than we did. We just had a meeting with the school today...how's this for ambivalence-causing...the administration that utterly ignored our polite conversations, letters, pleas, etc for more than a year, has decided, entirely on their own, to provide what I was planning to scheme, politic, volunteer, and manipulate to eventually get - they've decided to rework their entire first grade to do flexible groupings and have the kids travel to different classrooms for different level work, so that the teachers don't each have to try to straddle such a great range of needs in the classroom. They're going to trade off which teacher gets what group, too, so everyone gets to work on novels or what have you. The teachers seem happy, and we're thrilled. But...we spent all last year hearing how they cannot possibly group, the classrooms were all fully differentiated, etc, and besides, we were pushy and our kid not that smart. Then we come in with an outside psychologist and some nifty numbers and suddenly they're revamping everything?? I mean, great...but...if it was this easy to do, why on earth didn't they do it before?? So ...I'm really happy, and so glad we tested...but really ambivalent. Our son would be the same person without those tests and numbers, so why is it so different having the numbers? His needs - and those of all the smart kids around him who aren't tested - aren't any different for a number.

well. I guess I'll take it. And I'll try to be really really enthused and positive and hope this spreads into other grades, b/c I think it's a REALLY good thing for a lot of kids.