Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Explore vs. WJ for DYS application

As I was looking over the DYS criteria, it struck me that it must be harder to meet the Explore test criteria compared to the WJ numbers, because it you have a kid who is only mathy or only verbal, they will take that subscore alone from WJ, but on Explore you have to have 3 of 5. Do you think that is true (this is probably irrelevant for my DC, but a friend has a child who is prob. DYS material, and is starting testing, and I want to steer her in the proper direction to the extent possible).

Cat

I think that you're completely right. And for the Explore, it's not JUST 3 out of the 5 scores, but one of the three MUST be the composite. That means that you need to be pretty strong in all of the subtests, because if you bomb one, you won't get the necessary composite score.

The advantage of the Explore is that it's much cheaper.

I don't know. It's an interesting question, and Dottie probably has more data points to look at than almost anyone! Perhaps if you are talking about the 160 math kid, then he or she probably has verbal that would make the 145 cut as well. But if you were looking at a kid with, say, 146-148 in math, I wouldn't assume that overall achievement will cross the 145 threshold.

I haven't looked at the scores, but are the DYS cuts for the Explore test at the 99.9%? Actually, now that I think about it, that's probably impossible to say, as you have a very small subset of the population taking the Explore out of level.

In a lot of ways, I think the Explore is better than WJ-III or WIAT, etc... It may not have as high a ceiling, but it has more questions on what it does cover, and the test-taking environment is more consistently applied.

My son was very borderline with his WJ Achievement score. When he did the Explore he qualified for DYS a year older in 3 or 4 of the subjects. I would say he is very well rounded and excells in many areas. I'm not sure how typical this scoring is.

My son was not scared to take this test and usually has no test anxiety. You may want to consider what type of tester he is.

The Explore is less expensive but the waiting is brutal. One consideration is how big of a hurry are you to try and qualify for DYS.

I hope this is helpful.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Since I am getting ready to sign my DS up for Explore, we were discussing whether she should sign her DS up.. For our family it makes sense as it is cheaper (and we don't really need the scores for anything), although we have to drive and stay a night in a hotel, and because I like how he can do it every year and we will have a point of reference (and DS is excited to take a test with science on it).

I had been encouraging my friend to have her son get a full IQ/achievement test done to start, because I think there is a bit of denial going on there (they know he is very smart, but I think he is DYS level, although that is just my uneducated guess). I figured that way if the scores come back where I think they will, they will have everything they need. But of course it is pretty expensive.

So, perhaps it makes sense to see if they want to do Explore with DS (maybe they would both feel happy to have someone else they know there) and then once they get the scores, my friend may have a sense of which direction to go (I did this with SCAT, it gave me a sense of what we were dealing with). It is just the timing makes it so that this kid may lose another year of appropriate challenge, given how long the process takes with Explore. Actually, maybe they should do SCAT as a first step - cheap and fast!

Well, not my place to make the decision anyhow, just to give advice. Thanks for the insights on the testing.

And, on my own behalf, I am soooo curious how DS will do on Explore. I won't be waiting for DYS purposes, so maybe it won't be quite the torment others have felt, but watching the process unfold this spring, it did seem to take forever.

And then DD will have her full assessment next summer once she turns 6. That will be very interesting (DD is not biological, DS is, so it is all a bit more of a mystery).

Cat

Cat