Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment What IQ is considered Highly Gifted??

Thanks all,

Dottie, this statement of .1 % is what I don't understand. Why is this the same IQ that DYS needs for the PG?

Seems like the 145 score used by the school district for purposes of early admissions etc. is too high.

Ruf uses a lower score to identify HG but seems like she continues to be the only one to do so.

spirited mama

Not Kriston, but we've gotten some good information from the WISC IV. *However* what is much more important is that the tester understands and has experience with 2E kids.

Thanks, Kai.

Yes. Quite apart from the organisational/political issues, people who work in gifted organisations or education often write as though they don't understand the implications of what they do to celebrate diversity of talent.

Here's the Statistics 1 view of a fairly typical example (I won't name it, but I was reading one earlier today from which this example is drawn). Let's take a case where "gifted" is considered to mean "in the top 3%" - sounds pretty restrictive, right? Now say that there are different ways in which giftedness can manifest, and so you identify 5 criteria, and you say that a child is gifted if they are in the top 3% on any of the criteria. If these criteria are independent - which they won't be, but OTOH, they probably aren't that well correlated, or you wouldn't have felt the need to make the change at all - then even though it still looks as though you're using a "3%" criterion, actually the proportion of the population who satisfy it is 1 - 0.97^5 = 0.14 or so, i.e. now 14% of your population meet your "3%" criteria. Not so restrictive. Which may be OK, but you'd better know what you've done!

Don't try too hard, Spirited Mama, because no one agrees what HG or even just plain gifted is. You have to ask each person you are talking to what they mean by whatever term they are using before you start the conversation.

Personally, I call a kid HG when there are still having a tough time in the local gifted pull-out program relating to the kids because their learning needs are so different. Especially if the Gifted Coordinator acts like: 'This program is meeting the needs of our other gifted kids - what's wrong with yours?' I do think that Davidson puts their bar very low of the claim of PG, but since there is no accepted definition of PG or HG, and the test just fall apart at the Davidson cut offs, that this is ok. I've heard Bob D. say something like: 'IQ so high that they can not be acurately measured.'

Furthermore - each child is an individual, so if you want to meet a child's needs, then you have to access their current readiness levels and learning needs. IQ testing is part, but really a pretty small part of that.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

My thinking--mostly gained from reading here on this forum--is that if you see high IQ scores but significantly lower achievement testing and/or performance in schools, you may well be looking at an LD.

In that sort of situation, looking at a child's behaviors may not clarify matters for you at all, but may actually confuse you a whole lot because the behaviors may look mostly like an ND child, but with weird flashes of smarts that make you question your sanity far more than you do with a full-on HG+ child.

So the short answer is IQ and some sort of way of looking at achievement.

Just want to pipe in and note that there are PG kids who will not attend college by 10. Simply because it is not an appropriate choice for them, even though intellectually, they comprehend university level concepts.

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If I recall correctly, that score minimum on the WISC IV was set to 145 BEFORE extended scoring existed for the test. It makes sense because in the gifted test group the children were generally scoring lower on the WISC IV than they did on the WISC III. There was only one boy who scored a 150 in that group and no one scored above 150.

I am aware of a child who scored 160, but that was WITH extended scoring. I'm not privy to loads or score data, though, I'll leave that to the forum test score guru.

I will say that I do agree with Kriston that a score above 145 indicates a child is beyond actual measure since that score usually entails topping out several sub sections.

Yes, especially with homeschooling and online educational options on the rise, there are plenty of other ways for kids to get their needs met besides college at 10. That has a lot to do with personality, not just intelligence.

It seems to me that perhaps DYS levels cover kids who may have had an evaluation, but not with someone who could pull out the difference between HG and PG. Also, they recognize that many HG+ kids need way more than what they are getting in school and that through advocacy and education that may improve for other children down the road.