IQ scores

This kids processing speed is r e a l l y low and the freedom from distractibility is really low too…Is he a slow methodical kid? Does he have any speech or language delays? He seems a little stronger verbally than non-verbally.

Has anyone said anything about his possiblly having ADD, I say this because of the low processing speed and the freedom from distractibility scores and the other tests were untimed…

It is interesting because this child doesn’t have any attention issues, which people almost can’t believe.

This child does have an auditory processing disorder, which severely impacts learning, but the first set of IQ’s scores has always bothered me, there is something not right about them, it may be the person who administered the testing, I am not sure they were very competent.

This article talks about various tests, and how different disorders (including APD) might affect the results.

http://www.harborhouselaw.com/articles/kay.report.htm

Lil

What type of interventions were given between test 1 and test 2? Could the interventions given have anything to do with the test score differences? Have you noticed improvement in your sons ability? Maybe these answers will help answer the question. Or maybe your son was not feeling well or was tired on test day 1?

To the best of my knowledge, there were no accomodations given on the testing. When he had the second test, she did one subtest untimed but other than that everything was normal.

How exactly are the verbal and performance Iq’s determined? Is it from the subtest standard score?

My guess is that the child has memory problems looking at the low scores.
Arithmetic requires working memory to hold orally presented data to solve basic arithmetic. Digit Span is a test of short-term auditory memory. Coding is a mesual of short term visual memory. To zero in on this area consider having the test WRAML be given. Take a look at the the following web site for information on subtest WISC meaning:
http://www.patoss-dyslexia.org/epreports.htm

Also, if you want to know more about the WRAML on the parenting board I posted a response to a someone on the WRAML.

Helen
(just another parent)

Does your child appear to be paying attention? One of the dreamy types? i have seen this before…with some kids…APD and ADD can be extremely intertwined..

If he was diagnosed with APD did they do an auditory viglance test? If so how did he do?

I do not believe that they performed a vigilanc test. As a matter of fact, what is it?

An Auditory Vigilance test that shows how well they can pay attention to auditory stimuli for approximately 20 minutes. It is similar to the TOVA Which is the test of visual attentition…but the TOVA is done with Shapes that they see and they have to respond whenver they see this one particular shape.I have taken the TOVA and it is BORING….

I have given auditory vigilance tests…where the child is given a list of words auditorially without visual input one right after the other and are supposed to click a button or raise their hand whenever they hear, for instance lets say the Key stimulus is the word CAT. .

they would hear these words…mat, king, match, light, CAT, right, CAT, dog, snake, fool, pool, king, ring, nod, pepper, CAT, CAT. and everytime they hear the word CAT they are supposed to respond. This test will show how long they can maintain attention, it is very boring…and it shows if they anticipate responses, if they are slow to respond, etc…

Sometimes kids appear to be attentive, especially the good kids that are well behaved but what is frequently overlooked by many clinicians, teachers and parents is that these kids have this ability to tune things out when they want. As I have worked with kids over the years who have CAPD, ADD, and a combination of both.

I can tell when they check out.. I will say…”What happened just now? Where did you go?” I have heard responses…like “oh…how did you know?”…”Oh I was playing hockey at the school in my mind”, or “my cousin is waking up now and I want to go and play with her”…One kid who was a slow methodical processor told me…”I don’t know how to stop my brain, it just goes off on tangents”…and I said, “It’s ok, I understand…you are talking to the queen of daydreams!” That is no joke…I have both CAPD and ADD..

But what also happens with kids who have CAPD is that they get tired from listening, and they tune out and go into their own little world when the auditory stimuli is overwhelming…Thus they become distracted and inattentive to the world around them. So CAPD and ADD are very co-morbid and hard to tease apart. For years I thought my daughter’s problem was CAPD because of her hearing loss but it took me 4 years to realize that ADD was a huge missing piece of her learning differences…

Something the Doctor pointed out to me was the pattern of decreasingly lower processing speeds as she got older…When she was in kindergarten her processing speed was 122 and when she was in 5th grade it had dropped to 70 and that was another indicator that we were dealing with both CAPD and ADD. Infact, the doctor apologized to me because he initially thought she just had a hearing deficit and when he started testing her in detail he realized that she had both…CAPD and ADD.

PATTIM…what weight do you put on the ‘willingness’ factor…for example, do you consider a person ADD when they do this by CHOICE, or only when the person is frustrated by INABILITY to choose and limit the daydreaming?

So far, for myself and my child, I consider the ‘willingness’ to be the difference between ‘ADD’ as a disorder, and ‘gifted daydreamers who must be internally motivated to achieve success’ …but I’d be interested in your more ‘professional’ comments.

I also want to say thanks for all your posts! I have followed this forum since March 2001, and your comments about ADD have been very helpful to me in understanding my son’s difficulties…I always check in to see what your take on a situation is!
Best regards,
Elizabeth

I’m not Patti M or a professional like her, but you might be interested in some of Russell Barkley’s work. He posits that ADHD is primarily a disorder of self-control rather than attention. In his view, it is not that the person *chooses* to daydream in the face of hard or boring things, or that his attention is easily scattered, but rather that he lacks or is deficient in the neurological ability to muster up the effort needed to *make* himself stay on track.

In that sense, ADHD truly is a disorder of motivation, at least as Barkley sees it. We often think of motivation as a praise-worthy internal value or quality rather than a neurological process. We think that being motivated equates to being a hard worker, while lack of motivation to stick with the things that are necessary but uninteresting to us is viewed as a failure of character, as laziness if you will.

I’m as guilty of that kind of thinking as the next person, but I do know that my extremely “unmotivated” gt/ld/adhd child who only did what he felt like doing and could not be induced into action even with a major bribe, suddenly became a hard-working, extra-credit seeking, always-does-his-homework kind of kid when he began taking medication for his ADHD. Even off the meds (such as during weekend homework)he is now much more of a “motivated” student, but he has a more difficult time following through and is much more easily frustrated and fatigued by the effort. So, what Barkley has to say feels right to me.

Just thought you might be interested …

Andrea

I agree with Barkley. Lack of Motivation and self control is a huge part of ADD and it is regulated by so many things related to what we eat, how much we sleep, how we react to situations, fear, etc…And one of the biggest problems is motivating the concept of time and how long it takes to do things with being distracted and procrastination…

Part of the problem with motivation is also the willingness to stick through things until they are finished or not starting on the project in time and procrastination.. From my experience the person with ADD may have an incredible amount of motivation, myself in particular, I can go like a house afire on projects, I steam roll through group projects while the rest of the group is lolligagging…Now if you ask me to cook dinner, or to fold the laundry, I hate that..Yeah I am motivated to do it..I want to eat…. but I don’t enjoy cooking…I do a good job at it but it is BORING…same old thing over and over again…

I am motivated…because I like having clean clothes and I hate ironing clothes. I could avoid that if I would just do the laundry in a sequence but because I am so DISTRACTED by all the things I am doing I let the laundry go and I end up ironing clothes once a month…or my husband does it because he has no shirts left..LOL.

I have seen other people who have ADD who start off really great on projects but they drop the ball right at the end and on the other side…the people who procrastinate until the cows come home and whip it all together at the end…here is a little story..

I gave a friend some completed forms for a group project we were doing weeks ago.. She kept telling me she said she didnt’ have them, but I also know how OCD I am about things like this and I remember distinctly giving them to her…..Guess what she is ADD-Inattentive and she shoved them in a pile of papers…weeks ago…The motivation for her to find the papers was we needed to turn them into the professor tonight…So yeah…She called me to let me know that she had found them buried under one of her piles and I didnt’ need to re-do my stuff…Thank heavens!

Meds help so much with motivation…They don’t make you smart they just make you work more efficiently…

I am still a ‘meds conservative’, but I certainly agree with Barkley — have read some of his work. This is what is so hard for parents tho — at what point does one turn to meds? For me, at this point, just having ‘school problems’ is not enough — but of course, I am constantly monitoring that position and it could change! I am sure if we had home problems also I’d feel differently.

For me, no, I don’t like the laundry etc and it does get behind at times, but I CAN get it done when I put my mind to it, and the older I get, the more organized I get…for those of us ‘on the border’, so to speak, I guess I still feel we should be improving our self-discipline — yet I do see kids who I realize CAN’T. NOBODY would keep on the way they do if they COULD — I can’t describe it, but I KNOW the difference…

It still bothers me that so few people truly understand those at the level of ‘disorder’ — a couple of my cubs (one extreme ADHD, one Tourettes, plus several ‘upper level’ adhd, if you know what I mean) really suffer from adults who DON’T know how to manage them, and I KNOW this is a large problem at school for all of them, and of course socially. Never mind meds, if we could prescribe understanding, patience, and use appropriate methods (1,2,3, plus ‘How to Talk So Kids Will Listen’ type stuff works for me…) we would not need so many meds! Sorry, I’m ranting now, but !!

Thanks for interesting input!

This is all very interesting. My son has always been motivated. He just is hesitant to do things that are difficult. Near work for example, reading and writing, never colored or did puzzles.

He was always very curious and would insist I read him things over and over. He always wanted to KNOW everything. He was always a little intense, curious, and creative.

Once we started vision therapy I could really see why he avoided certain things. His vision really was a mess. I could see how these kids could be labeled ADHD. It is much more comfortable to bounce around doing pretend play than to sit and read a book. Quiet work, is usually close work, which is just painful to the visiually impaired.
He persists at exercises that I can tell are extemely painful for him. You can see it in his face. His therapist always comments that I should take a step back if I see the look of pain on his face because he has recognized that this kid is not a complainer and we don’t want to have him burn out by making him do things that are too difficult.

Now I do think I have a touch of ADHD and it is rampant on my side of the family, but I am beginning to believe that he does not.

This is a 14 year old (?9th grader )with a Verbal Comrehension index score in the low average range…how does she function in school? Is this student in regular ed. ? Also, usually IQ testing is done every 2-3 years, to have it repeated in a year would lead me to be uncertain of the valididty of the second set of results.

I believe my son’s difficulties are similar — unfortunately, his motivation is not similar, but we manage, if on a slower time line. One thing that strikes me is that he was farsighted ‘far longer than usual’ according to our optometrist — I believe Rosner mentions a correlation, though I haven’t read the book for a few years. I am going to put him through the geoboard course as soon as we get a break from school pressure. He also avoided handwork as a small child. His nursery school teacher was certain he would just ‘catch on’, but as we all know…HE DID NOT! Still, we’re getting there!

I enjoy your posts, too, Linda F. — you always lift me when I have a bad day and second-guess my decision to avoid SPED and remediate my son’s difficulties outside of school! I have no regrets, but it is nice to know I’m not the only one who found this path the best way for my child…

I am a hopeless pollyanna, prone to denial, I tend to think everything his hunky dory.

I do have my dark side though. I have days with my son when I need a self imposed time out. I think we all have those days. Yesterday was one of those. He just couldn’t write a single sentence. He was tired and homework was taking longer than normal. It just seemed he went back a whole year in an instant. I had to shut the book and send him to bed.

He got up the next morning and wrote a beautiful paragraph without any help. It was the best he ever did on his own.

It is good to have people like you to talk to about all these issues. It relieves some of the stress. And anyone who tells you there is no stress is just plain lying.

I was one of those challenging kids, in your face, wanting to know the whys and how come’s of everything…Things didn’t come easy for me with the ADD, Strabismus, and a hearing deficit and then becoming very near sighted by 6th grade…I also had gifts which included empathy, understanding, endurance and patience and gave me the “smarts” to make the best of whatever challenges came my way.

I enojoyed the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goldman. His theory is that Emotional Intelligence matters more than IQ. And IQ really doesn’t matter in the long run as much as self-awareness, self-discipline and empathy do because they add up to create a more well rounded person.

I read that book years ago before I even had kids. What a great book for parents to read!
Yes, my son is like you and has that emotional intellegence piece down. He has the same gifts as you. He has more common sense than most adults. Sometimes it is hard explaining this crazy world to such a rational little person.

Those gifts are a better indicator of success than IQ or pretty much anything else.
I mean real success; being a happy, caring, well rounded, person.

The IQ scores were not in the same year. They were done 18 months apart. There was minimal intervention in between testing, weekly speech and language and Wilson tutoring.

This child function o.k. in school. He is placed in remedial classes most classes have less than 12 kids per class with a teacher and aide.

However, I am concerned that the classes keep him at the same level and aren’t actually pushing him forward.