My son recently had his 3 year re-evaluation and his performance IQ went down 40 points!?!? What would cause this?
Re: IQ scores go down??
There’s a phenomenon called “The Matthew Effect” in which IQ scores drop over time. This is a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. An LD child who gets insufficient help learns at a much slower rate than his peers, and the gap begins to show up in IQ scores. There is a website somewhere that discusses this.
I don’t know if the Matthew Effect applies to performance IQ.
At any rate, if this was school testing I’d probably request an IIE and get some outside testing done. There’s information about IIE’s at the “LD in Depth” section of this website, under “assessment” and “IEP”.
Mary
Did he take the same test?
I know when I was in high-school, I finally got re-evaluated 6 years after my prior evaluation. By that time, however, I took the WAIS instead of the WISC. My performance IQ dropped signifcantly (30 pts, I believe). The psychologist indicated that the drop was due more to the different time limits (I worked slowly and therefore got points deducted for an otherwise perfect performance) than anything else.
Re: IQ scores go down??
There can be many causes for an IQ score to go down. Did your son feel well?, Was the same IQ test used?, Did something upset your son before being evaluated?, Did he put out the effort required to show his true potential? Alice wrote:
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> My son recently had his 3 year re-evaluation and his
> performance IQ went down 40 points!?!? What would cause this?
It’s an anomaly. Unless you see your son as acting very differently than he did three years ago, unless you see remarkable changes in this child eg he’s very withdrawn or very unreponsive to his surroundings then there’s no other explanation that it’s a bizarre mistake.
Any competent tester should be questioning a 40 point drop if the tester was aware of the previous scores. A 40 point drop should signal to the tester than they something was done wrong in testing. IQ scores can vary a bit but not 40 points.
If you have seen very remarkable changes in your child, those very remarkable changes might throw a big drop in performance IQ. Without noticing remarkable changes in the child, though, either the first test was wrong or the second test was wrong.