Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment What are the ceilings on the WPPSI-III?

It is all so confusing.... I still don't understand it. We retested with SB-V and got the scores, but not the report - which will contain the subtests. We should be getting that this weekend.... Good luck figuring it all out - I know I sure can't!!

I agree Mum that your DD is too advanced to be properly tested on the WPPSI, and that the scores is likely to be an underestimate - but - the scores she has are certainly gifted. Locally to me, the schools don't even care that a scores is over the 130 mark, let alone neighboring 140. So I wanted to check, do you have clear indications from the school that they will provide accommodations to 150 that they would deny to 138?

(A few schools do have a 'Highly Gifted' program with a higher cut off than 130, but, locally, those school do the testing themselves.)

I want to be sure that you aren't 'just assuming' that schools even know how to interpret IQ scores - or are impressed by them.

Our school said: We don't care about IQ and Achievement tests because they don't take into account how far 'above average' our students and teachers are.

Of course they we also in 'say anything' mode at the time.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

It takes a while Lukemac - years for me,
Grinity

It is all confusing. Though I am finding all the reading I am doing about DD2, whose results I am referring to here, has helped enormously in understanding DD1. And made me realise she needs to be retested... I expect rather soon they will both be doing the SB-V with a gifted specialist.

I find it very confusing making sense of ceilings at 17, why my DD had to have 4 performance sub-tests but I often see tests rated from 3 sub-tests for each section. I wish the psych we used seemed less irritated that I want to understand all the ins and outs of her results.

I am interested that she did really well on the 3D type performance tests but (relatively) poorly on the 2D type performance tests and frustrated that there is absolutely no mention of, let alone discussion about, this in the report. Surely this points to something interesting about how her mind works and what her strengths and weaknesses may be?

And finally I am wondering what it is about my kids, or our parenting, that neither of my older girls have been early readers and they don't seem terribly academically inclined. DD2 is clearly going to learn to read with ease and probably would be reading now if we had been able to give her even a modicum of support the last two years. But in general if she asks for help with something and doesn't get it she is more likely to go and play in the sandpit or climb a tree than persist in trying to read or write alone, though she will persist at other things for a very long time alone. I am very glad she has had a playful early childhood and I don't see there is any rush for academic learning, I am just curious about what it is that drives some gifted 2-3 yr olds to read while mine are driven to climb things?

That said my 13 month old is determinedly trying to draw and write at ever opportunity.

This should probably have been a new thread, it's not really testing related!

Grinity I completely missed your first post replying to me!

edited to add:

Just popping back to say the concise version of this ramble is the school is saying on the one hand "We take gifted Ed very seriously and we are really excited about your DD" and on the other "Her scores are nothing special and business as usual".

end edit.

We are in Australia, my eldest is in yr4 and this DD in preschool at private school with a population that is certainly biased towards "bright" kids and they claim to have gifted kids in every class (which I find believable as I know there were two in my elder DDs class until one moved interstate at the beginning of the year). I have no way of knowing the LOG of other kids at school but I would hazard a guess that the bias is towards a mix of very bright high achievers and OG kids. The school claims to have kids of my DDs LOG in most/every class which just seems statistically improbable to me (thinking more of how she would have scored if she had agreed to finish the coding).

There are no specialist schools for gifted children here and I would say that while there may be one or two schools of a similar suitability for my DD in my city/state there aren't any that are better.

My issue is that due to her date of birth, and our freaky school start system that happens only in our state and nowhere else in Australia, DD is due to start first year of school (FYOS) mid year and then do 18 months of her first year, having also effectively done an extra 6 months of preschool. She's ready now (well was ready at the start of our school year in Jan) to be in first year of school, she's getting more and more reluctant to go to preschool and although there is only one 9 week term of that remaining there is no way we want her then doing 18 months of FYOS and ending up the eldest in her cohort!

Added to this is the fact that she went through preschool last year with this years FYOS cohort, made friends with the "older" (by 6 months) kids who all went up in January and has been left behind by all her friends. So she's suffering socially as well.

We are pushing so that at the very least she gets moved to Yr1 next year, after 2 terms of FYOS, but ideally that she gets moved on from preschool now and gets 3 terms of FYOS. Moving now would also mean she gets those three terms with the kids she will continue with. If she stays in preschool and moves up on schedule she will be in a separate FYOS class that is exclusively for the mid year starters who will be doing fYOS again the next year.

The schools stance is that a) they have no room b) they have lots of gifted kids c) they will work with her where she's at no matter which year level she's in.

B and C may be true, though it remains to be seen how effective that is. For the two years we have been at school they have certainly differentiated beautifully for my elder DD who is G/LD but was neglected by her previous school who kept saying "She's so bright it will just click, she'll read some time soon" resulting in her being 2yrs delayed by the time we moved... Simultaneously I know the two gifted kids in her class were getting challenging material of their own and their parents seem/ed happy (these are/were DDs two best friends unsurprisingly). So I do believe they can/will differentiate but I just don't know that she needs to be the eldest in her cohort, or to do 6 terms of FYOS, no matter how well they differentiate.

And psychologically my DD is done with preschool, has lost her friends and really is hankering to be challenged more than a purely play based preschool can offer. Its not like I want her to fully skip a year or to enter a full year early. In other states we could have just started her this January if we wanted to, so she'll be young but she'll still in the ball park of her class mates.

Anyway my feeling is that we may need more "proof". We have to wait 3 weeks the principle to get back from leave so we can meet with him, I might be pleasantly surprised.

Sorry for the tome...

IF A equals B, then does not-A equal not-B?

(Let A equal reading before 1st grade, and B equal giftedness)

I say "No." I think that very young children (under the age of 4-5) are very good at leading their own development. It's somewhere in the early elementary years that a parent needs to look carefully and perhaps step in and intervene. I have to research to back this up and only one child - so take it for what it's worth!

Anyway - some kids just aren't developed enough in their visual system to read before age 5-6. If you think you may have one of those, try playing phonics games aloud. As my son said, years later, "How come, when I wanted to learn about reading, you always grabbed paper and a clipboard? I would have learned a lot better if you just talked to me about about it."

Apparently the outer-directed perfectionist apple doesn't fall far from the outer-directed perfectionist tree!

Be pleased that your DDs love to climb and play. I notice that the 3D problem solving is stronger than the 2D and I do wonder if her developmental path - because of asynchronous development or exposure - is such that 3D objects are easier for her to understand than others.

So I guess you could test that out by playing 'reading games' of making letters and words from clay. Handwitting without Tears also has some 3D materials for preschoolers learning pre-reading skills.

When a child teachs themselves to read at age 3 or 4, that confirms a very strong problem-solving ability, and giftedness. But there is no requirment that a preschooler use their problem-solving in any particular way, so another child, who is just as gifted, may not teach themselves to read.

Too bad about your school being unwilling. Personally I'd ask them what they would need to see to wiggle the age rules. I'd also stress the social/emotional card. In the US that seems to be mostly what is valued in school culture. "She misses her friends and is sad" might melt a heart of stone.

Love and more love,
Grinity

Thanks again for your thoughts Grinity.

In my elder DDs case it is becoming clear that she is profoundly visual-spatial with some sort of auditory and/or visual deficit. When she was assessed by the OT at 7.5 yrs with less pre-reading skills than DD2 has now at 4.5 (and has had for a year or more) he actually said "I can see from her visual tests that she is great at "Where's Wally" but can't read". For whatever reason she never noticed the words on the pages of her books until they were painstakingly pointed out, or the symbols for numbers. So in her case there is some manner of LD at play. Given she's bright bordering on gifted, a perfectionist and very strong willed, teaching her to map words (or numbers) to symbols was agonising for everyone.

"Teaching" DD2 to read on the other hand is a breeze, it's just curious that she hasn't self started more given that she insisted on playing starfall until she knew the alphabet completely before she was 2. She loves to play word/sound games and has a great sense of rhyme. Her pre-reading skills are all there, and have been there for literally years. But she hasn't tipped over into reading on her own. We haven't had time to help (pregnancy from hell with DD3, followed by DD3 screaming for most of her first year while we were trying to deal with DD1s delays at school - poor DD2 is suffering from ultimate middle child syndrome!), also she has seemed more interested in writing than reading.

Although now that I say that about being more interested in writing it makes sense. She's always been more interested in her own ideas, opinions, stories etc than other peoples. That sounds terrible and I don't mean it to be, she loves people and is a very friendly and generous soul, but it makes sense that she would be more motivated by getting what is inside her OUT than by getting what is in books INTO her, if that makes sense. And there is nothing like a perfectionist older sister telling a perfectionist little sister they aren't doing it right to squash a budding writer :-).

My son also knew the alphabet and what sounds each letter made at early 2 with great word/sound skills - and still he didn't read until end of kindy - mid 1st depending on how you define 'really reading.' I was very confused and worried - as he's my only LOL and I had time to worry! By end of first grade he was reading Harry Potter. I really think his visual system was just 'age-appropriate' even though he had the brainpower to figure reading out.

But oh! I took so much teasing for being worried about my 4 year old not reading words like 'exit' and 'quit' which he saw on the computer games quite often - sad to say!

Smiles,
Grinity

You should see the look I got when I tried to explain to a speech therapist last week that I thought there might be a "reason" that my 13 month old wasn't speaking yet :-).

"She's been trying since she was 6 months old, and now seems to have given up in favour of bellowing in frustration, she's the most advanced of my three kids in other ways and I have two gifted kids, one with auditory issues that I missed. I know it's early but if there is an auditory issue I want to do what I can early on." just did not fly. The funny thing was she then proceeded to try to engage my DD with play appropriate for a 2 yr old.