Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Ceilings for "younger" section of the WPPSI?

I see that the WPPSI-III is divided by age into 2 years 6 months to 3 years 11 months, and then 4:0 to 7:3. My DD is 3 years 9 months, and one of the options we have for testing her for giftedness is WPPSI. I am wondering whether there are any potential ceiling effects from splitting the test into two by age. The youngest group only do 4 subtests, compared to 7 of the older kids. Some of the missing ones seem to be performance speed related, so skipping them seems good, but some of them sound like they might test reading type stuff, that one wouldn't expect an under-4 to know. It's not that she is reading yet, but she has a lot of pre-reading signs there, and to be honest, I don't totally know *what* she can do. You'd think she couldn't count from talking to her, and yet she breezed through Reader Rabbit Kindergarten, and it didn't look like guesswork or cheating.

the younger you test, the more unreliable the tests can be. The kids are just too little and so many things can happen. I would wait until she is at lest 4. You will get more information from the other subtests.

Is there any particular reason you'd be testing her? Local gifted schools don't even take results from kids under 4, too unreliable. Most of them prefer for the kids to be at least 4 yrs. 6 mo.

There is no reading/pre-reading or anything like that in the WPPSI, not even in the older kids version, WISC.

Our gifted school doesn't insist on testing for entry, however I think that they will be far more open to placing her ahead of her age if we have test results to back up our feelings. The level of the other kids, especially in the preschool, probably because not all are tested, is not as gifted as we'd hoped, and we've had trouble convincing them to accelerate my son to be with kids working on his level, even though they are happy for him to work on his own level in the classroom with his age-peers.

Unfortunately she turns 4 a week after school begins, which will be rather late to convince the school of placement issues. Certainly it made it harder when advocating for my son, it was so much easier to leave him where he was while deciding what to do.