Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Question on testing

To those of you who are test guru's i'm curious.....

In working with the GDC in Denver to determine what testing my DS7 actually needs, their recommendation was this.

In addition to the WISC IV they want to administer the SB-LM. Have any of you had this done? The person I talked to said the SB-LM is much better at identifying the outer limits and takes "quirks" into account. I'm not familiar with this test at all and wondered what you guys think?

I'm not a guru, but I can at least tell you the little bit that I know while you wait for the gurus...

The LM is a test that does have a longer tail and is generally the test people are talking about when they say someone has a 200+ IQ. The tests that are currently widely accepted don't generally go higher than 160, though extended scoring can potentially stretch that a bit.

The LM is, however, an outdated test that is not widely administered anymore and is not generally accepted for entrance to programs like DYS. (Of course, I realize your DS is already in DYS, so that's not really an issue.) The big problem with outdated tests is that scores tend to be higher on them than they should be because of the Flynn Effect. Proponents of the LM for use with HG+ kids dismiss the Flynn Effect as a minor concern, claiming that it boosts scores by 10 points or less.

On a personal note, I considered giving the LM to my DS9 back at the start of our journey, mainly because the LM is the test I was given as a kid, and I thought having the same test with the same scale might help me to understand him better. How is he like me? How is he different?

Ultimately, I decided it wasn't worth the money. I think living with him has taught me more about his quirks and his needs than another test, particularly one that really isn't going to be accepted by anyone for anything. I suspect achievement tests like the Explore and the SAT will prove more useful to us, and they are a lot cheaper!

But that's just my take. YMMV! Fer sure!

Ditto Kriston. You can find many articles that recommend using the SB-LM after another IQ test. However, very few testers actually do that. There are many that say that nobody should use it anymore, even as a supplement.

I think SB-LM uses the ratio scores.

We used the SB-LM when DS8 was 4.5. and then used the WIPPSI III the following year. The ineteresting part was the score was within a couple of points. DS then took the Woodcock Johnson Achievment test the next year and scores where DYS level. The SB-LM was not as helpful as the other tests. The SB-LM was given for admission to a private school and the administrator report seemed to stop at the limit needed for the school. Ds completed the CTY test last year and did well, his results seem to still mirror the achievemnt test. We may spend more money in the future for a WISC, but its more out of curiousity then need. As Dottie says, over time a good picture develops.

Whew! Usually when I post about testing I get something factually wrong, so I'm relieved.

I can't help but wonder whether they are recommending this for their own data set. They use data from their test subjects in a lot of their presentations. (Sorry, I'm feeling a little cynical this morning.) I think that everyone else has covered the cost-benefit stuff for you. It comes back to the "why are you testing and what do you hope to get out of it" question.

One of my kids had the LM administered as part of a battery. Even accounting for Flynn by subtracting ten points, the score would be over 200. It was a little scary too see numbers so high, but I don't think the data has proved as helpful over time as the W-J achievement.

Here's what I would like you to ask GDC: Is there a time when you imagine it will no longer make sense to administer the SB-LM? What be the determinant that this time has come?

Outside of the GDC everyone else accepts this test is out of date. You would be getting results that aren't usable for any advocacy purpose for your child because the test is so out of date and is no longer secure. Aside from a few preschools out there it won't be accepted for admittance to any program.

If they do not believe it is possible to get an accurate score on the WISC IV they should be using the SB5 which is the current version of the test. If you need more than IQ testing then they should use acheivement testing. I would really question in 2010 the value of paying for the SB-LM. It seems to me the main benefit at this point in time is to hear a huge number for kids who don't top out other tests. Just anecdotal, but I've talked to enough parents who were told by the GDC that their kids were VSL with auditory processing disorders that it makes me skeptical about center.

And, for what it is worth, I say this as a parent of a child who took the SBLM after topping out other tests. I can't imagine paying money for the test now that the SB5 is available.

The SBLM was last normed in 1972 - so close to 40 years. Even the articles on the GDC website say it was only being extended as a supplemental test while awaiting for the SBV to come out. That was some time ago. And, my understanding is that the original poster's child has not yet been tested. So, how can they know that the child will even need supplemental testing?

The problem is that people think "it's a score on an IQ test, it must be comparable to scores on other IQ tests." But it's not even remotely. The current technical bulletin from Riverside literally uses the phrase "apples and oranges." The deal is that if you compare, say, a WISC-IV and an SB-5 IQ, they're measuring somewhat the same thing in somewhat the same way -- they're asking, "how unusual is this child's performance compared to the performance of other children the same age?" The SBL-M is not asking the same question -- it's asking, "what number do we get when we divide the child's age equivalent on this test with his chronological age?" The problems with age equivalents are numerous, too many to go into here (maybe I'll do a series in my blog on test scores and what each score type does and doesn't mean), to the point where professionals are strongly discouraged from using them. And even if you did think that age equivalents had some reliability and validity, they are not actually linear data, nor do they have a true zero -- they are really just ordinal data (you can say "ahead" or "behind" but not how far ahead or behind). Which means that you cannot actually add, subtract (= compare), multiply, or divide (= create ratios) with them. (And all of this is before you even think about the fact that this test was written in 1960 and last renormed in 1972 and is based on an outdated idea of what intelligence is and how to measure it and is culturally biased and so on...)

The bottom line is that a 160 on an SBL-M is not "more accurate" than a 140 on an SB-5. The two scores aren't even measuring the same thing -- it's as if you said, "The kid had a 32 BMI but a 148 lb weight, so the weight is more accurate because it's a bigger number." The scores aren't even comparable -- the scores on the SB-5 are, in fact, compressed towards the mean (as the technical manual for the SB-5 shows). But that doesn't mean that the SB-5 is missing some crucial information that only the super-special SBL-M can show. It means that they are using different measuring systems with different markings on the measuring sticks. It is frankly misleading to suggest otherwise.

And gratified is right -- I literally see eye-rolling from psychologists and educators in response to the L-M. It makes the parents look like the narcissistic pushy parents the professionals might already tend to assume we are.

Frankly, I question not just the possibility with *any* test, but also the *utility* of knowing whether a kid is in the top .1% versus in the top .001% of the population. I don't believe that X test score always means Y intervention will be necessary (I really disagree with professionals who say things like, "Oh, your kid is so smart, he will never be happy in any school.") -- kids are much more diverse than that, and so are interventions. The further you get from the mean, the more the score is dependent not just on what the kid and the tester had for breakfast, but also what Louis Terman, Maud Merrill, David Wechsler, Gale Roid, or whoever else wrote the test had for breakfast -- how the very notion of intelligence was defined and what specific item types and item content were used to measure it.

My husband likes to use the analogy of an "AQ" (athletic quotient) test -- sure, it would probably have endurance and agility and speed and power and strength measures... but could it tell you whether Lance Armstrong is a better athlete than Nadia Comaneci? Is the question even a meaningful one? And would knowing the answer tell you anything about what either one needed to continue to develop as a an athlete?