Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Woodcock-Johnson Test of Achievement-III (WJ-III A

We are considering more testing for ds6. We know that writing is his weakest area and actually quite stressful for him if there's a lot of writing. Is it ok to skip the Broad Written Language subtest of the WJ-III achievement test? We may use these scores for DYS if they are high enough, so is that a factor? I know ds could qualify if his scores are good enough on reading or math, so can we just skip the writing? The cost will be less, but mostly I just want to keep ds from going through a stressful writing exercise that will likely not help his scores at all. Thanks!

I would do the whole thing. The writing part is really short. My dd took it a little over 6.5. I would tell the tester to leave this part to the very end. I think you would gather information from that. I don't think it would be an issue for YSP if his scores in written are low, but high enough in the other area or 2.

My dd is not very fast with numbers, and I am glad at the end we did WJ (that has the timed component) instead of WIAT (has not). I think it was good to know that while I classed her as slower, we discovered she is still ahead of grade leve, just not as much.

There were a few tears when my DS7 (then 5) took the WJ-III during the writing portion but he managed to get through it. As Mam said it is relatively short. Without those subtests you will not really get a complete picture of the child. We also discovered that even though our son struggled with the writing he was still above grade level in those areas.