who should do eval?

If I were to do it over I would have done the eval privately. I think there are errors in my son’s eval.
The evaluator admitted that she was absolutely crazy busy. She even used the wrong name in part of my son’s report.

I am kind of stuck with that eval for now. I plan to have another one done privately after he finishes vision therapy. I am told that his IQ will go up after vision therapy.

If I knew then, what I know now, things would be different.

You can not have them both doing the same tests because that will invalidate the results. Find out what tests the school is doing and give the list to the indpendent evaluator.

Helen

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My child’s worst areas were in the performance sections of the WISC III. My child has trouble with angles and copying. So, that may be where you may see some point gains in IQ. Just a thought.

The performance side of IQ tests involves visual processing. If visual processing is a problem, then IQ, as measured by 1Q tests, will be lower. Some this may be ameable to remediation while other aspects are not—for example, my son had terrible visual discrimination. He is much better now, following therapy, and I would suspect he would do better on some of the performance side of IQ tests (he tested below average).

Terri Bellis, in her book on auditory processing, relates how her own IQ dropped from genius to low average following a car accident. She says “I shouldn’t have been surprised. Many of the IQ subtests rely on motor coordination, visual-perceptual skills, sequencing, memory and the like—all areas with which I was experiencing difficulties. She relays how she got much of her functioning back through therapy—and you would presume, although she doesn’t revisit this issue, her IQ went up.

Beth

The doctor said that it doesn’t always happen and that is what I have read elsewhere. He said that with my son it would. He said my son was obviously very bright but he has extremely poor ocular muscles and he could really see them impeding his performance IQ. This doctor seemed to do many of the same tests done on the performance side of the IQ.

My son’s performance IQ was a 90 despite being extremely verbally bright. When that IQ test was done it was the end of first grade and he could not draw a square.

I believe that if we did the test today it would be higher because of the help he has already gotten with his visual motor functioning through OT and interactive metronome. I do see that these vision exercises are extremely difficult which tells me that he really still has some problems.

Interestingly my son has marginal attention. His attention is at it’s absolute worst during these exercises. He can not sustain the focus to do these even though they are simple to me and my 4 year old without vision problems. He must say 20 times while we do them, “Are we done? Are we done?”
This is a kid who didn’t really have difficulty sustaining his attention for the even more boring IM.

I really see for myself the correlation between poor vision and poor attention. He has come so far, I have to believe getting those eyes working is going to take him even further.

Interesting. My daughter’s Perf. IQ was very high, yet she has visual processing problems and she gets 30/min OT at school 1x/wkly and private OT 1x/wkly. High performance, Low verbal. Yet has motor planning, & visual processing problems. Interesting theory.

There is clearly more than visual processing being tested on the performance part of an IQ test. My son falls down at least partly because he is poor at part to whole reasoning which is tested in several tests. But at the same time, his ability to do puzzles has improved dramatically and I would think that would impact some of the testing (like object assembly which was his lowest score—a 5!).

Still, I find it interesting that your daughter could do so well and still have visual processing and motor planning issues. Some of the tests are timed and that tends to bring down the scores of those with motor planning issues. What aspects of visual processing are difficult for her?

Beth

Leah,

It is interesting that your daugther has visual processing issues and high PIQ. Did you address the visual processing issues? How did you find out she had problems with those?

We just visited the dev. optometrist and need to go for a second visit, but… My son also has high PIQ (although only 8 in coding- which I think is reflecting his poor visul-motor coordinatio- he hit some of the subsets really high) and I was wondering how this could happen with visual processing problems… Any thoughts?

Ewa

see http://alpha.fdu.edu/psychology/effect_of_speed.htm

I’m just guessing but training prob. has an effect on speed on the performance scale.

All I know is that the evaluation says …the majority of the erros on this visual moor evaluation fell in either the rotation or integration areas”. She has processing delays in all areas: visual, auditory, short term memory and processing speed.

She has gone to sensory integration OT and that has helped alot.

Went to website, just saw a chart with #’s which meant nothing to me. What am I missing?

Honestly, I don’t have a clue why she did/does well. She scored 19 in symbol search, which I think is partly perserverance. Now THAT she HAS!

For everyone but the youngest kids the performance scale subtests on the WISC have bonus points for speed…to get a superior or above P IQ score requires that the kid get the bonus points for speed, the site I posted shows the difference without the bonus points for speed. Many times when a kid is retested at 10 or 11 the P looks lower but it’s actually that they didn’t get the bonus points for speed. I wondered if this was what was meant by increasing IQ..ie going faster and getting the bonus points for speed.

When you say “the youngest kids” what age are you talking about? My daughter was 8 at the time of her first testing.

I would guess that with all her deficits, she would NOT be able to hold her own speed wise as she gets older - so you believe this is where the drop in performance IQ comes in?

I’m just trying to make sure I understand.

Thanks for your patience!

Yes, as the kids get older to get higher P scores they need to get the speed bonus…maybe that’s how vision therapy claims to increase IQ, I don’t know anything about vision therapy but I’m guessing this maybe it. Ask the person who tested your child about the speed bonus on the P subtests next time she is tested.

My best friend has a child who had a 145 PIQ in 3rd grade. Now it’s 106. Reads according to evaluator approx 4th grade. Has tremendous spatial skills and can fix anything. The speed thing is probably what mades the difference. Mom is beside herself re: failing her son. This must be what they mean when they say the LD kid’s IQ drops as they get older?

Thanks for the insight. I’ll talk to my evaluator.

Leah,

Beth pointed me toward an excellent book. How to increase your child’s verbal intellegence.

Some studies suggest that a child’s IQ can move as much as 50 points from the ages of 6 to 18.

They discuss the factor’s involved.

On another note, my son’s dev optometrist said that my son had trouble with picture completion. This was a specific skill he thought his therapy would have an affect on.
This dev optometrist does more than just eye exercises. He does things like visualization as well. I could see how the specific skill of visualization would help picture completion. I also think sar is right about speed because they do some motor planning as well which should affect speed.

I would also warn to be very careful about starting vision therapy. I think there is a very wide variation in dev optometrists out there.
You really need to interview these people and ask about some very specific things.

So, that’s the name of the book: “How to Increase Your Child’s Verbal Intelligence”?

Re: vision therapy. I think my OT addresses this (of course, it’s in combination with motor planning, etc.). Does the deve. opt do the same as an OT, except visual only?

I think there are areas addressed by the VT that OT did not address. My son just has very poor eye muscles. You can see it when you ask him to track your finger. His eyes just jump around.

I think the OT did help some of these issues ie he doesn’t write down the side of the page and his writing speed was above average. He definitely has focusing issues. We had to move to a color coded chart to do the near far exercises because he kept losing his place. It was just too difficult for him without the color coding.

My particular vision therapist addresses alot of the same issues as the OT. We have been able to skip certain areas that are already remediated through OT. They are pretty good about having him do only what he needs. Some VT’s do not address the balancing, fine and gross motor areas.