WISC 3 I.Q. score not valid?

Because the spread is > 15 points averaging to get an IQ is not valid. Some school districts will use the higher IQ to determine if there is a descrepancy. A lower verbal IQ can indicate a language based disability but on the otherhand a 118 is above average. If a child had expressive or receptive language problems then the VIQ can be lower. Also look at the spread on the subtests on the VIQ. How large is the spread?

Helen

It is also important to really look at the subtest scores. What subtests were relatively low? Sometimes inattention will negatively impact learning and show up in depressing certain subtests, for example.

Frankly I understand the idea that the full scale IQ may not be valid, but let’s get real here. An IQ of 118 is very high average. Just look at the percentile rank, probably 80 something.

Generally we do use the higher IQ, however these are generally cases where the performance is 105 and the verbal is 90. Naturally we use 105 for qualifying.

I would not be absolutely convinced by anybody that there is anything wrong with a verbal IQ of 118, nor would I be convinced that there is any reason this is not adequate verbal aptitude for school learning (which is overwhelmingly vebal). If you used the 144 score, you would only need an achievement of 123 to qualify. Frankly, I would think that if the overall reading score were 123, to qualify this child would be bordering on ludicrous, unless significant processing issues are evident.

I think we need to rethink some of this. If a child has a performance IQ in the gifted range and a verbal IQ in the high average range, why would we place this child? If the child has processing deficits that cause achievement to be below 100, then we probably should. We will know if reading is very labored or if there are phonological processing deficits.

However, if P.A. is merely average and word reading is progressing along normally for age and grade level, then why would we place a child whose ability to sound out words is merely average and not in keeping with his visual-spatial talents?

I would view this as a bright child who is gifted visually-spatially. This child will probably be very talented in math and really good in terms of understanding verbal-based learning. I don’t see a problem or a reason to make a problem because the child’s abilities are a little uneven.

I certainly would not argue a child who has 118 verbal IQ has a language disability! If that is a disability, then most of us are in a world of trouble.

nt

Anitya:

> I certainly would not argue a child who has 118 verbal IQ has
> a language disability! If that is a disability, then most of
> us are in a world of trouble.

I am just a mom, but I would argue that this might not necessarily be always true…

My son has a similar profile although not so gifted as this boy.

My son’s verbal IQ was above average when he was tested at the age of 7 and went down by 8 points when re-tested at the age of 10, widening the gap between his verbal and performance even more.

And he is diagnosed as having expressive/receptive language disorder.

Without proper intervention he will probably slide even more down.

But agree with you that the processing deficits might be a better clue whether the boy needs services than achievements results.

As Helen suggests, perhaps the evaluator *meant* that the Full Scale IQ is not as valid as the VIQ and PIQ scores viewed separately.

Your child is certainly very gifted at visual-spatial tasks and exercises. The verbal is less, however, still at the very high end of average—nearly above average.

Without seeing the individual subtest SS scores, I cannot tell you what it means, except verbal problem solving skills are not a well developed as the skills required for visual spatial tasks.

Rejoice, your child is very smart. Post individual subtest scores if you wish more information. Also post Indices if you have them.

yes, they did use the higher I.Q. score to qualify him for services.

he was tested at my insistence through the public school; his brother is severely dyslexic (average intelligence score and a much broader subtest scatter on the wisc; and we have provided lots of private remediation for him, but did not start until age 8). because of the heritary nature of dyslexia and the fact that this 6 year old seemed slow at acquiring pre reading skills, even with minor intervention, i asked for testing.

Anitya said:
~~~I think we need to rethink some of this. If a child has a performance IQ in the gifted range and a verbal IQ in the high average range, why would we place this child? If the child has processing deficits that cause achievement to be below 100, then we probably should. We will know if reading is very labored or if there are phonological processing deficits.~~~

the thing is his p.a. is average to strong for his age. the school may be placing him in special ed to appease me (i.e. the problems with severe dyslexic brother mentioned above), however what i am really concerned about is the regular classroom reading instruction (“balanced”; don’t want the kids to become too dependent on decoding; lots of “predicting” (i.e. look at pictures and guess; etc.). even with outside (now 1x per week, but he has been off for a few weeks) tutoring, his progress is not what i would expect. he is not moving forward in his reading skills (decoding, etc.) and seems to have forgotten some of the sound/symbols. could this reading instruction be causing his difficulties to be worse?

now he is refusing to go to school; today he told me he was in the lowest reading group (he brings home books with words like tricky toad and silly snake - which he can’t read; his teacher tells me she does not have any phonetically controlled reading books in the classroom!!!) and to top it off he will NOT work with me at all on reading; this is a bright, bright kid who desperately wants to be in control - and boy is he strong willed.

i could teach him so much, right now, in reading, but he just will not let me. talk about being frustrated.

here’s the individual scores: any further input on them would be great.

WISC 3:
performance: 145
(subtests: object assembly.= 13; picture arrangment.= 19; block design.=19,coding =19; picture completion. =14)
verbal: 118
(subtests: similarities = 11; arith.=12; digit span = 12; comprehension.=12; info = 14 and vocab. = 14)
full scale 133

woodcock achievement: broad math= 96th%; broad written lang = 77th%; word attack= 85th%; passage comp.= 35th%; decoding = 85th%

visual spatial: 70th%
visual memory: 30th%
visual sequential memory: 98th%
visual figure ground: 97th%

lac test = 62 (currently in mid 1st grade); my understanding is this is strong p.a. for his age and grade.

parental assessment:

-knows beginning and ending sounds of words consistently;
-knows most sound/symbol correspondences, but mixes up some short vowel sounds
-has had outside handwriting instruction, so he can write and recognize all letters (confuses one or two)
-sight word base of 50 words, though often only knows these words in isolation and not in reading connected test.
-can decode simple cvc words, but slowly.
-strong resistance to reading activities (even disguised ones) at home.
-has been in a reading recovery pull out program for 8 weeks; pulled out of program4 weeks ago by parents; school admits this was the wrong reading instruction for him.

THANK YOU all.

i had to copy this over from another topic section on these boards:

A prime complaint against special education is that it mislabels children. U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige says that roughly half of special education students are wrongly placed in the program because “our system fails to teach many children fundamental skills like reading and then inappropriately identifies some of them as having disabilities.”

IS THIS WHAT IS HAPPENING TO MY CHILD?

In my limited opinion, yes. That is certainly what it sounds like. If you can’t change schools, you need to find a qualified tutor who knows how to teach reading. (Or bribe him to do PG with you!). Personally, I would be doubtful about the LD program fixing the problem anyway.

Janis

Your child appears to be dyslexic. There are dyslexic people with high IQ and low reading ability. His frustration level must be very high.

First, expect some changes in the IQ because the WISC scores aren’t very stable for six-year-olds. Certainly, I would expect him to continue to be intellectually superior in his visual logic. This area seems more developed than his verbal logic, though it is in the high average range. His processing speed is excellent (Coding subtest). Visual closure is a little low.

I’m suspicious of that visual memory. If you can get the Bead Memory and the Memory for objects subtests of the Stanford-Binet…or perhaps parts of the Wechsler Memory Scales…or some of the visual and memory subtests of the Das Naglieri (e.g., Nonverbal Matrices and Figure-memory), you might find out what is up with this. The 30th percentile is significantly lower than other areas. I’d investigate this more.

Since your child is logical, I’d do multi-sensory, systematic, synthetic phonics (Multi-sensory structured language). I don’t usually do this (via Orton-Gillingham) with this young a student. He’s probably bright enough to work through it cognitively, where most kids aren’t ready till 4th grade.

Your child is very, very unique. A private tutor may be less frustrating for him because they gear instruction to his exclusive needs.

what do you all think, given this profile about doing the lindamood bell program for him 1-2 hours per day. this would be at as private clinic during the time he has reading at school (i.e. he would go to school after reading at school is over).??

i would do the phonographix with him in a minute, but it is a huge struggle to get him to work with me and in the end not as productive as it should be. so working with me is really out of the question.

lindamood bell is close by, available, andit worked wonders for my older one. lmbell has said they would start him in seeing stars program and i am familiar with this program. but it seems to use a lot of symbol imagery..will he still learn to decode properly??

this little one is starting to feel very frustrated.

also, how does the processsing effect his reading?

i really appreciate all of your professional insights into this kid. my school educators tell me very little!

Annise, I think he needs more testing, like neuropsych. testing. Even the WJ-Cognitive has good subtests, so does the NEPSY. His only weak area on what you posted is visual memory. This would certainly contribute to difficulty learning letters, sounds and words. His automatic rapid naming should be looked at (called RAN), working memory in visual and auditory. A good P.A. test does tap some of this. The CTOPP has RAN subtests and subtests where the examiner feeds the child a word segmented into sounds and the child must blend them into a word and pronounce it. Poor working memory impacts this enormously.

You can quickly assess some of this at home by trying digits reversed. You state two digits, then say them backward, as a model. Then let him try. If he passes two digits reversed, then try three, etc. I continue until he fails the same number of digits three times. I just assessed a first grade boy who appears to have many LD issues. He could give me two digits reversed and only 4 forward, and he turns 7 this month. Anyway, if he cannot manage digits reversed, then he is going to have difficulty holding more than, perhaps, three sounds in his working memory to blend into a word.

When this is a deficit, we train it by giving lots of practice with segmenting and blending gradually longer words. They neuropsych. assessments can also assess the visual sequential and visual working memory.

This is interesting to me, Anitya because my child just had the TAPS-R and her standard score on number memory forward was 81 while number memory reversed was 101. What does that mean?

Janis

this addresses CAPD but talks about providing services to a child based on mental age, not chronological. If a 9 yr old has a mental age of 12, even a score of 10 should be remediated, acc/to this author.

I don’t think this is US, however ;)

You son has similar profile as my dd (same kind of split, but hers is not as high IQ as your son). She even had that lower visual memory vs. very high visual everything else. She also scored high on LAC, but blending and segmenting (where you had to delete a sound from the word) was terribly hard for her. (i.e just because he scores high on LAC doesn’t mean he has good PA skills). She scored in average range on TAPS and I was told that the CTOPP would have probably caught her problems better than the TAPS.

I think the LMB would be a good move for you - esp. the 1-2hrs every day. I really believe that is why it failed for us in the beginning- it was not intensive enough. And the Seeing Stars and V/V I would bet is a good fit as well. My dd I discovered could not see the pictures in her head -not only could she not see symbols, but she couldn’t visualize images on her own. She would need visual clues for this to happen. When you auditorily read to him (don’t show him the pictures) ask him if he can see the ‘movie’ in his head? Ask him to describe an object for you? How does he describe it? Does he describe details about it or is it more in feelings? ex. Candle - is it tall, green, brass holder, yellow flame or does it smell good, make you relax, looks pretty etc.

If you son is anything like my dd, our kids actually see words as pictures because of their high visual-spatial abilities= it’s not natural for them to decode a word from left to right. The everyday cognitive work that LMB should do, is re-train your son to read and blend left to right. My dd’s first tendancy is to look at word whole and blend from middle to out (if she even thinks about blending to begin with - her natural tendancy is to match that word with another picture in her memory and guess).

Our school teaches reading the same as your and it is very bad for kids like ours - it reinforces their tendancy to look and guess.

You child may need a quick pace. I’d rather see a reading teacher trained in multiple methods who can select aspects of all that are appropriate for your child.

I’ve seen some excellent LiPS people and I see some that just follow the program without regard for individual student needs. It’s that way with anything, really.

Without knowing your child, I cannot know what intervention would be appropriate.

Sorry. He’ll know, though. And he’ll tell you. Be sure to have him give it a fair trial—sometimes they want to bail out too soon and then come ‘round. Give it three-four lessons at least.

Does this mean that any WISC with >15 pt spread is invalid? We had a 23 pt. spread, Performance being the higher level (gifted range). Considered to be SLD - Language disability AND processing delays. I’ve heard you should “press” to have the school use the higher score b/c the Full scale is “brought down” b/c of the disability. Is that the reason? Sorry, if this is a “dumb” question, I’m just a mom trying to learn as much as possible re: my daughter’s profile.

No. The test is not invalid. You just do not use the full scale score when there is a difference of more than 20 points, usually. That difference can indicate an LD, and at least here, we will use the higher of the V or P scores to measure the discrepancy between IQ and achievement. I assume that is probably in the WISC manual so it should be common practice.

Janis

According to the WISC manual, a full scale score is not “invalid” if there is a 15+/- point spread between VIQ and PIQ. However, for determination of educational services, using the higher score is a better measure of ability because it doesn’t penalize the child for their neurological processing disorder (E.g., we give children tests in their native language; we give speech impaired kids language-free IQ testing).

If you gave Leah a language-free IQ (such as the Leiter), she’d probably score in the confidence band of the WISC-III PIQ. I’m not suggesting we must re-administer IQ testing if a student scores discrepant on one side or the other *because* we can just use the PIQ score or VIQ scores, if needed to level the playing field. It is >95% reliable…so why waste the resources and time to do that.

Not everyone agrees with this school of thought. The neuropsychologist at our children’s hospital here definitely does—and I learned from him. Schools often do not because it qualifies too many kids.

I haven’t seen it in the WISC manual. Sattler may have written about it. I haven’t checked. That would be interesting to do if I ever had time.

Actually, 1SD (or 15 points) is considered enough. +/- about 12-13 points is statistically significant according to Sattler.

Makes sense that the LD would cause full scale to be lower. I thought I had heard you say before, Susan, that you push to have the higher score used when qualifying. Thanks for the heads up.

My dd explained to the tutor on the 1st visit, “Well, yes, you read left to right on the LEFT side of the page, but you read right to left on the RIGHT side of the page”. She was 7 (almost 8) beginning 2nd grade.

Oh dear, no wonder we were having problems!

Now that I think about it, I believe it is in our state procedures manual that says not to use a fullscale score if the V and P are 20 points or more. As a parent, I would certainly challenge a 15 point discrepancy if using the fullscale score was keeping my child from receiving services.

Janis

reminds me of my 6 year old learning his left and his right.

he is left handed and we ask him which hand is his left hand and he hesitates we then ask “well, which hand to you “write” with?”…as if this isn’t confucing for these kids…now i always catch myself when i start to say this….

also, after years of reading exposure and instruction and everyone well aware of the problem that this kid could not read, my older dyslexic child asked me one day (he was at the end of 2nd grade) mom, which way do we read a book? he really did not know where we started at the front or the back when reading a book and because i was so naive at the time about reading disabilities i truly thought he was joking…

now he loves japanese comics and understands in japan people read from the “back” of a book not the “front” like we do.

Annise-
My son just completed a 4 week daily 4 hours per day course of treatment at LMB.( I have no idea if it helped his reading yet because we haven’t read together since he finished.) I can tell you from observing a session and seeing the materials they use that its about visualization and decoding. The material included many of the OG rules for decoding he’s been learning anyway. Its just that the way they have him practice them involve alot of air writing and visualization exercises. Good luck.