Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Question re visible scoring during test

Does it strike anyone else as a problem that my child could see the tester's notations as she administered him the Stanford-Binet V? He already suffers (@ 8 yrs old) from low-level anxiety and perfectionism, and the first thing he told me after the test was, literally, "Mom, I got zeroes." I asked him what he was talking about, and he told me he could see the psychologist scoring his answers with "0, 1 or 2" and that he got "mostly 2s" but he also got "lots of zeroes." Fortunately, he seems to have performed okay (FSIQ 140), but he was nervous going in and, esp for kids with high degrees of anxiety &/or perfectionism, it just strikes me as potentially disastrous that they can see a string of zeroes as they attempt to answer questions. (Case in point, I believe: He said his pull-out teacher had encouraged him to at least venture an answer to every question, even if he wasn't sure, but that on "20 or 30" questions he didn't even hazard a guess. I'm positive that came out of the fact he was sweating the repeated notations of zero that he could plainly see.) Is this normal? I mean, should I mention it to anyone at the school so that they can change this for future testing? I don't know...maybe seeing 2s has the reverse effect, and actually bolsters esteem during the test-taking process, but it still doesn't sit quite right with me...

Hi Newbie - Welcome! FSIQ with 140 is a very high score - particulary for a worried guy who could see those numbers - perhaps he was bolstered up by those '2' afterall.

My heart goes out to you, because you want to do the right thing and let the school know your son's experience, an yet, politically, is this going to mean that you lose points with the school - just as you are potentially trying to do some advocacy work.

I know that I would want to know, but one reliable thing is that most humans have a thick streak of defensiveness, and that very few of us welcome bad news. I believe that a disproportionate number of us 'bad news welcomers' are gifted, so it's hard to not project our own attitudes onto everyone, but it's a skill worth learning.

Bottom line: If there isn't any advocacy that needs to be done, or you are leaving town soon, then 'share' but if you are the beginning of that long advocacy haul, skip it. Your duty to your individual child is much stronger than to those abstract 'other similar children of the future' - and that takes most of us Gifted parents a long bitter time to learn too. I think we are disproportionately idealistic, and tend to project that as well.

Or am I just projecting?

LOL,
Grinity

Grinity, thank you, and I totally agree. I don't plan to say anything to the school unless (and maybe not even then?) they push back on my son's scores. Even then, I would have mixed feelings: If those are his true scores and they're not right for this particular gifted program, I don't want to push him into something that will set him up for failure. But if he's on the cusp, and I suspect (as I do, based on the limited information before me) that he would do very well in that program, then there might be a question in my mind as to whether the less-than-optimal testing made a difference.

I do hate to think that other children, with perhaps more anxiety than my own, would experience the same and be negatively affected by it. And yet...even as I type this...I know I won't say anything. Exactly as you point out, it's not wise to criticize at a time when I need the district to be as forthcoming and cooperative with me as possible (though perhaps I will find the right time to say something in the future). I mainly wanted to know if that was normal, given that this is our first IQ test experience (DD8 is my oldest, and my own IQ test as a child was different than today's, I believe), and see if anyone here had the same reaction I did. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback!

Sounds like a plan! You Go!