low full scale IQ

Hi Lulu,

Before we discuss enriching neural connections, let’s discuss this FS IQ Score “thing.” What is the split between the VIQ and PIQ? If it is more than 12 points, using a FS IQ score may not reflect his true ability because he’s being heavily penalized for a severe processing weakness.

Now, old-time teachers believed (and were told) that IQ is static. Stays the same. Now-days, we’ve seen too many kids have wonderfully enriched home environments and lots of travel experiences, whose IQ’s have risen significantly.

A book for you: WISC-III Compilation. Published by Academic Therapy Publications. The whole book is activities/games designed to help different areas measured by IQ tests. Doesn’t “teach the test.” Gives activities based on certain skills. Divided up by grade levels (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12, I think).

I’ve seen IQ change lots. Many of our kids need lots of work to mature. There are great games & activities to help with this.

MGuinesses (PG folks) have a book called How to Increase your Child’s Verbal Intelligence which is packed with ideas. My son’s similarities score went from below average to average after working with this and other materials. There is another book I’ve used called Lollypop Logic (from Rainbow Publishers).

My son’s IQ tested as 84 at age 5.5 and 99 at age 7.5. His performance IQ increased mostly because, I think, his ability to follow directions improved. The tester noted his inability to follow directions at age 5.5. We did Fast Forward in the mean time which improved his receptive language skills.

Based on my experiences, I would make sure that there aren’t processing problems clouding the IQ testing.

Beth

Beth,

You are so right. Those scores are downright scary. We have kids score like that everyday (70’s and 80’s) and they are written off as slow learners and not given special ed. services. From 84 to 99 is significant. Wow.

Janis

IQ testing is an inexact science at best. While it is not always the case, the scores children achieve on IQ tests can certainly rise as they age and mature.

Susan is on the money. If my 7 yr. old were diagnosed with an 85 IQ and there were no signficant split, I would spend extra time reading to and with the child, taking care to work with language development. I would insure rich experiences of travel (even locally) to “broaden the horizons.” At 85, a ten point shift either way would prove significant. Ken

This gives me hope. I was concerned that the IQ was going to drop, not go up.

IQ scores do change with time, but usually not significantly(ie going from low-average to superior is very very rare); unless you are “looking for a certain score” to qualify for services or a program, the actual number means not too much. Look at http://alpha.fdu.edu/psychology/low_scores.htm for a discussion of this area.

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IQ does assess ease of learning, but what it really tests are visual memory, visual sequencing/planning, auditory memory, vocabulary, general knowledge, and grasp of middle class social mores. I honestly wouldn’t pay any mind to the total NUMBer on the IQ test. The important things are the subscales, which will tell you where to aim remediation. If you have deficits in visual issues, this will greatly debase your performance IQ. If you have deficits in auditory issues (or got side-tracked into a low performing group where you were not exposed to rich vocabulary) then you will have a low verbal IQ. If you have deficits in one alone the school will give you a label of LD and a few assists. If you have deficits in both, you get the MR label and the school will wash their hands of you. Since both visual and auditory processing can be improved, I have always thought that this was grossly unfair and does no more than chisel the children of the powerless out of an education, while convincing them and their parents that the kids are too dumb to learn.

My eldest kid’s IQ was clearly gonna be somewhere in the 70s when we halted testing at age 6. (We didn’t want to know.) She tests at 110 right now, (age 12) and we are aiming for 130 before we throw in the towel, as she is toying with the idea of going to medical school, and you probably need to be at least 115 or so to be able to handle that. She is doing just fine incidentally, getting A’s and B’s and working independently in a fine preparatory school. My own IQ went from borderline mentally retarded at age 6, average 100 at age 8, gifted 132 at age 14, to genius (150, top of scale used) at age 26. My twin sister Shari’s IQ acted similarly. This is a very common phenomenon with language-impaired kids such as hyperlexics and we qualified for the label.

The things to do are to first check out visual processing (www.vision3D.com will get you the name of a provider near you who (probably) understands this. Then get him tested specifically for central auditory processing disorder (regular audiograms do not work). I would try posting your name and city on the “parenting a child with Learning disorders bulletin board) and asking for names of an audiologist who understands it (most do not) close to you. Then call them and ask “how many children with CAPD have you tested? Ten would be good”. Once you have a diagnosis, you can either go to them for remediation, prognosis, and the fee would be variable, or you could try, like many of the parents on this forum to remediate them at home yourself with at home Fastforward (www.scilearn.com), at home vision aerobics and visual exercises (www.visionaerobics.com)see also Jenny’s great posts on visual exercises on parenting a child with learning disorders etc., and use the professional for testing to see how you are doing. If auditory or visual Memory is an issue, then this should be sepcifically stretched. (I liked the brainbuilder program at www.advancedbrain.com). PACE and audiblox are similar to the good old fashioned thinking skills (www.thinkingskills.com) and are similar to Reuben Feurenstein’s Instrumental Enrichment. Feurenstein was an Israei who worked with children coming out of the Holocaust camps. Almost all of them tested in the severely mentally retarded range - a combination of starvation, terror, and lack of stimulation. He very aggressively set up a program for teaching them every skill from sequencing up. It was workbook based, extremely intensive for for child and teacher, and much to the surprise of prevaling wisdom was effective. It was then expanded to other children with mental retardation including Down’s children with similar improvements. You can get his (quite readable) book from Amazon entitled “Don’t Accept Me as I am”.

My guess is that the current average IQ of 100 (which has been drifting upwards under the pace of a widely literate culture and has had to be renormed a couple of times) could be brought up by at least 30 points over baseline by individually tailored interventions. Take the WISC III instrument, for example. This IQ test is probably the most commonly used one for testing kids. It consists of two parts, a verbal and a performance part. Each part has six subsets. The verbal portion involves the following:

VERBAL

(1) Information - This purports to test fund of general knowledge, and requires factual knowledge, long-term memory, and recall. This attempts to measure how much general information the child has learned from school and at home. Obviously, if your child doesn’t learn easily in classroom settings and never gets new knowledge over time by other means, this will drop. Equally obviously, it will rise with a decent education (of which most ld kids are deprived by virtue of spending time going over basics in their pull-out programs.) So if you give your child the education she is otherwise missing, this part of the score will rise. Recall means that if your kid has crummy word finding, he or she will score poorly on this, but again, word finding is something which can be drilled into improvement.

(2) Similarities - Targets verbal abstract reasoning, and requires abstract reasoning, verbal categories and concepts. The child decides how things are different or alike. Again, this is something which can be improved by focussed work. The exercises laid out in the book Language Wise www.readamerica.net are very good for this. Vocabulary exercises, similarities, analogies, differences, etc. are useful, especially if the child is forced to either recite or write his response.

(3) Arithmetic - (Purports to measure numerical reasoning, and involves attention and short-term memory for meaningful information; Attention and concentration, numerical reasoning.) This is not pencil-and-paper arithmetic. Rather, it purports to measure verbal mathematical reasoning skills by giving the child oral problems to solve. Thus, if your child has a crappy auditory short-term memory (real common among kids with CAPD, who nearly always have trouble reading), then this will be artificially low. Attentional issues will obviously also impact this, as will never having learned your math facts due to poor schooling.

(4) Vocabulary - Knowledge of word meanings. This involves language development, word knowledge, verbal fluency. The child explains what a word means by defining or describing what it does. The dictionary definition is not the only acceptable answer; however it should be understood that verbose answers are GREATLY preferred, and that the customs and mores of professional-class America should at all times be kept in mind during the response. Thus, one of the questions on the WISC III asks “What is a donkey?” The response “It’s like a horse,” or “It’s a pet” each score 0 points (lowest possible) regardless of whether or not the child happens to own a pet donkey, as do quite a number of rural kids. The response “It is something you pin the tail on at a birthday party” scores 2 points (maximum possible), as does the dictionary response of “It is a member of the horse family.” Moral of the story: Teach kids to use a dictionary so they are accustomed to this sort of language, teach them to respond to test questions in a verbose fashion, and to ALWAYS use the dictionary response in answering such questions on IQ tests. (While I recommend teaching kids vocabulary for increasing their general intelligence performance) the actual vocabulary tested on IQ tests is nothing much. Test-wiseness is much more useful than knowledge in this particular area.
(5) Comprehension - This measures social comprehension and judgment. Again, social comprehension should be understood as meaning “as practiced by the American professional class.” Sample question. You are on the playground and a kid smaller and younger than you comes up to you and hits you. What should you do? The response “Smack him one upside of his hayed…” which might be appropriate in some American cultures will net you 0 points (minimum score) The response “Go and tell a teacher” will net you 1 point. The correct answer is some variant of “Walk away from him” or “Try and find out why he is acting that way”, each of which would net you 2 points, the maximum possible. Remembering the need for verbosity, it is preferable to say both. That way, if you have a borderline response on a different question, you will be more likely to get a break. Notice that obtaining the lowest possible score did not require cluelessness. Thus nobody is advocating turning cartwheels as an appropriate response to being punched, just as nobody answered “It’s a little table” in response to the question about the donkey in the previous section. Nor - from my evaluation of the testing manual - are such aberrant responses anything the designers expected to see. I’m not making this stuff up. I have seen the WISC III instrument.

(6) Digit Span - (1) Short-term auditory memory for non-meaningful information; (2) Short-term auditory memory, concentration; (3) This measures a child’s ability to remember a sequence of numbers (both backwards and forwards). Normal short term memory involves being able to remember a sequence of 7 numbers forward and 3 backward. 5 numbers forward is the lower limit of average and 9 numbers forward is the upper limit of the average range. You want to score as high as possible. Short term auditory memory can be successfully improved by Fast Forword (up to 5 digits), Earobics (up to 4 digits), Brainbuilder www.advancedbrain.com (up to 20 digits forward), and Play Attention www.playattention.com. Obtain whichever ones are most appropriate to your needs and use ‘em. ‘Nuff said.

There are also six components to the Performance portion of the IQ test. These are:

PERFORMANCE

(1) Picture Completion - This tests attention to visual detail, and requires both alertness to detail, and visual discrimination; (3) The child looks at black and white line drawings and tells the examiner what part is missing. For example, an eyebrow on a woman’s face might be absent, or a nail might be missing on a hand. Clearly, if your child is a poor artist, and is unused to performing this sort of exercise, work in this area will improve his or her score. Magazines like Highlights for Children also have little games in them which work on this area. Vision therapy www.vision3d.com for those with poor visual processing, who are drawing “stick figure” people at age nine or ten, or “squashed bug” people at age six or seven will also help them score higher on this subtest.

(2) Coding - This tests visual-motor skills, and visual motor processing speed. It requires visual-motor coordination, speed, concentration. , This section measures a child’s ability to decipher a code and copy the correct symbols in a controlled period of time. Crummy visual motor processing, poor coordination, and crummy eye teaming will do a number on this area, and conversely, improving these areas will bring up the child’s score, as will teaching him to translate in other contexts (letters to ASL or braille), etc. Also, again, advise them to work as quickly as they can without having errors. Time counts. This is also true with respect to the other performance areas.

(3) Picture Arrangement - Tests attention to visual detail, and requires sequential reasoning, planning, social logical thinking knowledge; (3) This requires a child to put pictures in order so that the story they tell makes sense. It measures their ability to create the whole from its parts. Prep for this by requiring the kid to tell stories verbally and in writing, and by cutting up comic strips and having them put them together.

(4) Block Design - Visual abstract ability, requires spatial analysis, and abstract visual problem-solving. Unlike picture arrangement, where the child is given the parts and makes up the whole, this test measures the child’s ability to look at the whole first, then break it into parts, and finally to reconstruct the whole. It provides pattern blocks and pictures, and the child must put the blocks together to re-create what’s in the picture. I suggest having the child look at quilting patterns and engage in putting together paper quilts with paper blocks to improve this area.

(5) Object Assembly - This tests part-whole reasoning. It requires visual analysis and construction of objects. The child is given simple puzzle parts and must complete the puzzle. The puzzles are very straightforword. This test measures a child’s ability to make a whole out of its parts. Teaching strategy. Teach the child to handle jig-saw puzzles. Cut up pictures of animals and people and have them put them together. Real easy.

(6) Symbol Search - This assesses visual-motor quickness, concentration, and persistence. It is similar to the coding section, but doesn’t require the translation step. Again, the issues are visual processing, and vision therapy is what is required for people who do badly in this area.

(7) Mazes - Tests graphomotor planning, visual-motor coordination and speed, and requires fine motor coordination, planning, following directions. The child has to find the way out of a maze by using a pencil. The strategy for improving performance in this area is to teach the kid to use pencil and paper mazes. There are plenty of appropriate materials in the bookstore. If they are developmentally uncoordinated, work on that with OT.

SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE

With respect to the scientific literature, it is true that for large GROUPS of school-aged children, IQs seem to stay relatively constant. (This is because IQ tests are constructed to yield such scores in large groups.) However, scores for INDIVIDUALS within these groups can vary tremendously. One of the first decent research studies to show this, was a project in which the IQs of 152 children were tested repeatedly between the ages of twenty-one months and eighteen years, two youngsters showed increases of 70 and 79 points (1). (This is sufficient to move a kid from being educable mentally retarded, to gifted.) Two other children in this long-term study decreased about the same amount. Even the school aged boys and girls in this study showed widely varying IQs. One changed by as much as 50 points and several by as much as 30 points between the ages of six and eight. Only fifteen percent of the group maintained IQs with less than ten points variation, even during the theoretically stable school years. Similar changes in child IQ have been seen in many other research studies since then, particularly among preschoolers. There is almost no relationship at all between the scores a child makes as a preschooler and again as a teenager. (2) But perhaps, kids with language or learning problems are different from the population at large? Maybe IQ is stable for them? In fact, the reverse is true. A sample of 937 children in New Zealand was assessed at ages three and five years to estimate the nature, prevalence, stability and significance of developmental language delays in three year olds.(3) Follow up studies at age five showed that the specific language delays were not highly stable. Even less stability was seen when the performance of 101 educable mentally retarded children were analyzed on four annual administrations of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. (3) How about ordinary learning-disabled students? Temporal stability for learning disabled students evaluated using the WISC-R at the median ages of eight and eleven, showed less stability than was the case in the normal population. (5) When 130 children with learning disabilities were given the WISC-R at a mean test-retest interval of two years, eight months, three standard deviations of change were noted for most of the subtests. (6) When WISC-Rs were given to 402 ld kids, only fifty percent of the variance in the second test was accounted for by the scores on the first. (7) Adolescents? The test-retest stability of the Hiskey-Nebraska Test of Learning Aptitude was examined in a group of hearing impaired children and adolescents. Test-retest correlations for subjects retested after approximately 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years were .79 (strong), .85 (strong), and .62 (moderate). These findings are similar to those reported for normal subjects in studies using verbal intelligence measures. In spite of reasonably high test-retest correlations, more than one half of the sample showed a ten point or greater difference in Learning Quotient between the two evaluations, and more than one third of the sample showed a 15-point or greater difference. (8) The stability of the WAIS-R was investigated in 53 sixteen year olds in another study. IQs retested after 18 months increased beyond the practice effect. (9) As you know service eligibility decisions are often made on the basis of the relationship between IQ test results and academic/language performance. This triage model assumes reasonable stabity of the IQ -academic/language performance. Unfortunately, the relationship is not stable. (10) Incidentally, the average change in IQ in hyperlexia was 50 points. (11)

Literature Cited.

(1) Marjorie P. et al. The Stability of Mental Test Performance Between Two and Eighteen Years. The Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 17 (1948).

(2) Oppenheimer S and Kessler JW. Mental Testing of Children Under Three Years. Pediatrics, Vol 31 (May, 1963).

(3) Silva PA The prevalence, stability and significance of developmental language delay in preschool children. Dev Med Child Neurol 1980 Dec; 22

(4):768-77/ (4) Silverstein AB et al. An attempt to determine the intellectual strengths and weaknesses of EMR children. Am J Ment Defic 1984 Jan; 88

(5):435-7. (5) Anderson PL et al. WISC-R stability and re-evaluation of learning disabled students. J Clin Psychol 1989 Nov;45(6):941-4.

(6) Bauman E. Determinants of WISC-R subtest stability in children with learning disabilities. J. Clin Psychol 1991 May; 47(3): 430-5.

(7) Haddad FA et al. Long-term stability of individual WISC-R IQs of learning disabled children. Psychol Rep 1994 Feb; 74(1):15-8.

(8) Watson BU Test-retest stability of the Hiskey-Nebraska Test of Learning Aptitude in a sample of hearing-impaired children and adolescents. J Speech Hear Disord 1983 May;48(2): 145—9.

(9) Thompson AP Molly K. The stability of WAIS-R IQ for 16 year old students retested after 3 and 8 months. J. Clin Psychol 1993 Nov; 49(6):891-8.

(10) Cole KN et al. Stability of the intelligence quotient-language quotient relation: is discrepancy modeling based on a myth? Am J Ment Retard 1992 Sep; 97(2) 131-43

(11) Burd, L., Fisher, W., Knowlton, D. & Kerbeshian, J. Hyperlexia: A Marker for Improvement in Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders? Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 1987, 26, 407-412.

If you need more references, you can look them up on PubMed “http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/”

Actually it usually does drop without intervention. That is known as the “Matthew effect” (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer) and is well documented. However, it does rise with appropriate intervention.

Shirin,

I have been trying to get an explaination of the WISC III for 2 yrs. It seems to be some big secret test.

Thank you for your great explaination.