practice strategies for the WAIS III intelligence test.

Hi there,

Which subtests did you have problems with?
Please post your results here and then I will be able to offer some advice.

I took it recently too and am waiting for results.

Pls folks, if you *must* compromise the test… think twice! I’m not sure about this, but you might end up getting LD OnLine in trouble.

The tests are standardized based on people who *didn’t* know the questions ahead of time. The folks who make the test could really have a hizzy fit if subtest details got on a public forum. So while I totally sympathize with you wanting and needing to get a higher score, you might be opening up a big can of worms.

(NOte: I don’t work for LD ONLine, I have no power over what you post and what happens to it! That’s why I’m posting this publicly instead of sending private messages… )

Sorry Sue,

I was not going to divulge any questions that were on the test… I just wanted to see which subtests he had problems with.. I know that going through PACE or Brainbuilder, for example, can increase IQ score because it trains working memory and processing speed… I personnaly had trouble with math and picture arrangement subtests. Maybe I have LD.

That would make a lot of sense. I should have known :-) Sorry for being nervous when there was no need!

For those cognitive skills, you might look at Lexia Learning’s Cross Trainer that has visual thinking and logic in it. ( http://www.lexialearning.com )

General reading skills have a lot to do with written IQ tests. General information is important. Read, read, and read some more.

Victoria is right, some of the words in Vocabulary subtest are not used often, except in books, so if you don’t read quite a bit, you are going to miss lots of them. There are 30 words or so and you have to define them. Information subtest questions were very easy, but I managed to screw up one of them… If someone is interested in WAIS III, you can make a search on the Web and find the info about the kind of subtests in this test. In a year or so instead of WAIS III there is going to be WAIS IV with more complicated questions and maybe even different subtests.

Absolutely, READ ;-) Books on tape would serve the same purpose, *especially* if you look for new words along the way, and think about the background knowledge that books will give if you let ‘em.

“In a year or so instead of WAIS III there is going to be WAIS IV with more complicated questions and maybe even different subtests”

if it’s anthything like the WISC IV my IQ will drop 5 to 10 points, which will diqualify me from earning a college degree. :(

How can IQ disqualify you from getting a college degree? I teach college and I don’t know what my students’ IQs are. Getting a college degree depends on being able to pass your classes. This likely has a relationship to IQ but is certainly not the same thing. I get a lot of bright students who don’t do what they are supposed to do, for example.

On your original question, search the internet. I found information on IQ tests earlier when I was interested because of my son. What I found told you what skills were being assessed which can help you figure out what to do to strengthen your weak area. My son, for example, did poorly at tests require parts to whole reasoning.

Beth

Agree… your iq score doesn’t disqualify you at least not in the U.S. It doesn’t mean college is the right place, either - nothing’s that simple :-)

lack of mental ability can disqualify *me* from getting a college degree. and as I already said if I were to retest and my Full scale were to be in the 70’s wouldn’t that be equal having the mental capacity of a 12 year old?

Lack of mental ability certainly can prevent you from getting a college degree but realize that a new IQ test does not “make” you any less smart (or more) smart than you already are. So you are wasting your energy worrying about that. In my experience, few students don’t make it through college because they don’t have enough “ability”. Study skills and choosing an appropriate major seem to me to be the most important predictors of success. I mean I loved geology but when I learned how much math was required, I wisely decided it wasn’t for me.

Beth

Right. The test changed. YOu didn’t. You’re as smart as you were before the test.

And maybe you aren’t smart enough. And maybe you are, but college isn’t for everybody.

I do work with people who study really hard, but they really don’t have the mental ability **for college.** It DOES NOT mean they have the mental ability of a 12 year old. There is a lot of learning that isn’t measured in an IQ test.

There’s more to the question than “do you have the ability?”

YOu might have the ability, but how much time would it take? Is it the best way to spend that time? It could be that any of the college courses would be as hard and painful for you as the math would be for Beth.

That can still be worth it if it’s to do something you really want to do - so it’s worth getting good help & guidance figuring out what you want to do before starting off in college.

Honestly all I really want is to become independant and have a marketable skill doing something that I enjoy doing… I have yet to find my niche. My self confidence has been shattered, but some of us were born with Mcjob ig’s and I guess I must accept that and move on.

Forgive me for being so negative but more and more companies are starting to cut back on health coverage and other things, I have a right to worry….

Well, what are you good at? What do you enjoy doing? One route that a lot of people with LD take is to work with their hands. Of course, it depends what your specific LD is. My son, who is LD, has nonverbal abilities and as a result doesn’t have great visual skills so I don’t see that as an option for him (which worries me, of course, since school is not is forte either). But for those with ADHD and dyslexic type profile, various trades are a good option. I had a neighbor of mine’s brother doing a whole bunch of electrical work around my house. He is hyper as anything and I can’t imagine him in a class room but he remodels houses and it works for him. I know he is dyslexic as well (from my friend—her son is too and we were talking about family history).

Where I live good trades people are in cosntant demand. I waited six months to have my porch screened. Having just sufferred the wrath of hurricane Wilma, roofers are practically revered!!

Beth

I have poor visual skills as well, since I was 7 years old i’ve been wearing bifocals. I’ve always enjoyed talk radio and have considered a career in communications before. All I want is a lousy associates degree in this field, that’s all that’s really required to work for a local tv affiliate or radio station. Right out of high school I did study this program but quickly bailed out once the courses became more complicated. My first semester in college I got a 3.0 and thought that I was smart enough to float by without any academic help, boy was I wrong.

oh well

*mixes drink*

I don’t particularly enjoy college, I struggle immensely and ALWAYS did in school despite always getting good grades for EXCRUCIATING effort. However, my family has a college at any cost, by any means attitude. I am in my junior year and will plod along till the end. I am barely coping but coping. Actually, I am glad that my mother has this attitude. I wouldn’t have come as far along if she didn’t. Yes, my college diploma would just mean sweat and tears and drive rather than incredible mastery, but it is still a very good thing that I will have it, for my self-esteem if not for much else at least. Just my rant.

Okay, what courses did you take and get that 3.0 average?

Another angle for you to take is to get into the school and focus on excelling at the stuff *in your major,* and making contacts in the professional field and looking for a “side door” into the business. That way, even if there are courses that are your nemesis and you don’t pass them, you could still end up with what you want - a career in what you’re good at and enjoy.
And keep at it, itsmethere :-) Can you see that light at the end of the tunnel yet??

Good idea Sue thanks for the advice!

And “itsmethere” I’m sure you’ll make it, you should be very proud of your cognative strengths, there are some of us who don’t really have that much upstairs, and I’m one of them.

Unfortunately, I am not too happy with my IQ either. It’s very mediocre, at best. I would also do anything so that my brain works more effictively and efficiently.

I do most things by rote, despite TRULLY TRYING to understand but in vain. At times, it feels like college isn’t for me, but I persevere.

“A person”—I am sure you can do better on the WAIS next time. Certain subtests are especially amenable to practice. For instance, for digit span, just make up a strategy—anyone can improve greatly at that after initial exposure. For symbol search—with a strategy you might not perform stellar, but a ten is totally possible. Vocabulary-just make it a habit to keep a vocabulary notebook, look up and write down an unknown word every time you encounter it. And don’t be lazy to look up the same word multiple times as well as to write the very same word up multiple times in a notebook. That way, eventually you remember it. That’s exactly what I do and it helps. Vocabulary is something anyone can build up and in a year/ a year and a half of agressive vocabulary building you’ll see results. By the way, vocabulary has nothing to do with intelligence; all it measures is one’s desire to be intelligent. As for the more reasoning based “similarities”and vocab. def. based on understanding, etc. just think about what words mean and what features and attributes the word encompasses. Make up a mental venn diagrams to see how words are related. The hardest part of those tests is that they are timed because with purposeful thinking, you can get it all.

The hardest part of PO tests is that they are timed. However, if you practice A LOT with strategies of how to attack them, esp. block design, and picture arrangement (although this doesn’t go into your IQ), your score will go up. Practice and desire to improve should totally work given the structure of the current WAIS.

Hi ItsMeThere:

Retesting guarantees a higher score. When you repeat tests the scores are naturally higher because you’ve processed the test items.

In our doctoral research class, we students re-took the Wechsler after one week and voila! We were all two standard deviations above the mean or more! All 20 of us were at genius levels in just one week!!!!

Don’t worry about scores- they don’t matter. Rather, review the types of errors that you made. Do these errors manifest themselves in class? Under what conditions do they appear? Then develop an action plan with your special needs counsellor/tutor/teachers for accommodations in class.

Good luck!

Naw, I think you were all just undiscovered geniuses :-)

You guys really shouldn’t try to PRACTICE in order to increase your WAIS scores; all it’ll do is show that you know how to look up information in order to cheat on a test, just to make yourself feel better.

We have learning disabilities. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. What we REALLY should be doing is advocating acceptance and accommodations for those with disabilities, rather than trying to hide it.

This is a person’s (someone who I personally consider a genius) view on being labeled “retarded”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn70gPukdtY&feature=channel_page

And her blog:

http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/

Good day!

[quote=marc]Hi ItsMeThere:

Retesting guarantees a higher score. When you repeat tests the scores are naturally higher because you’ve processed the test items.

In our doctoral research class, we students re-took the Wechsler after one week and voila! We were all two standard deviations above the mean or more! All 20 of us were at genius levels in just one week!!!!

[/quote]

Well, yeah; the test-re test reliability is 6-12 months. So in order for the second results to be valid, you’d need to re-take the WAIS after at least a year.

Is there anything out there that can you can use to practice the block design part in particular? Or any of the performance part?

My problem is that I have OCD which is specifically focused on test anxiety. I want to develop some exposure-response prevention routines that will help bring down the anxiety enough to perform at my best on the test (and not hyperventilate). Timing and deadlines push the anxiety way into overdrive. Other than that I seem to perform extremely well on IQ type tasks (enough to put me in the gifted range), though my working memory is definitely letting me down in parts - enough for me to have sought out an assessment to see if I have a LD as well as the OCD and possible giftedness.

The last formal stand-alone verbal intelligence test I had to do was at the 99th percentile, as I can retrieve that sort of stuff effortlessly from long term memory even if I’m in bed with the flu, and visual-spatial stuff I can usually come out smiling with, and logic should be fine, but anything mathematical is usually not terribly great, and under stress and anxiety conditions that’s the first sort of thing to go, and any working memory task I find extremely difficult. I already expect to perform poorly on digit span, as I know that when we’ve done digit span tasks in my postgrad course I’m worse than everyone else in my class. N-back tasks that require me to remember more than 1 item back are usually difficult and abysmal, so I know that there’s going to be a distinct discrepancy (it’s why I’m doing the test after all), but the OCD leaves me hugely anxiety ridden when faced with testing. I know from informal practice on Stanford-Binet type test material standard exposure-response prevention techniques can bring my anxiety down enough for me to perform with some ease. Plenty of stuff is published on that sort of stuff so I can work on the anxiety beforehand, but there just seems to be nothing equivalent that I can use for the WAIS. Even looking at a picture of the booklets on the publisher’s site sends my anxiety up to about 8 on a scale of 10 - and that’s without even doing anything!

So some material that I could incorporate into clinical anxiety preparation pre-test - even if it was a commercial kid’s toy (I know there was research done on one kids’ block toy that was similar to the WAIS task) would be helpful at this stage.

I don’t want to pre-empt the test - I just want to orient myself mentally so that I won’t be coping with racing heartbeat, stiff muscles, laboured breathing, and hyperventilation at the same time.

[quote=itsmethere]Unfortunately, I am not too happy with my IQ either. It’s very mediocre, at best. I would also do anything so that my brain works more effictively and efficiently.

I do most things by rote, despite TRULLY TRYING to understand but in vain. At times, it feels like college isn’t for me, but I persevere.

“A person”—I am sure you can do better on the WAIS next time. Certain subtests are especially amenable to practice. For instance, for digit span, just make up a strategy—anyone can improve greatly at that after initial exposure. For symbol search—with a strategy you might not perform stellar, but a ten is totally possible. Vocabulary-just make it a habit to keep a vocabulary notebook, look up and write down an unknown word every time you encounter it. And don’t be lazy to look up the same word multiple times as well as to write the very same word up multiple times in a notebook. That way, eventually you remember it. That’s exactly what I do and it helps. Vocabulary is something anyone can build up and in a year/ a year and a half of agressive vocabulary building you’ll see results. By the way, vocabulary has nothing to do with intelligence; all it measures is one’s desire to be intelligent. As for the more reasoning based “similarities”and vocab. def. based on understanding, etc. just think about what words mean and what features and attributes the word encompasses. Make up a mental venn diagrams to see how words are related. The hardest part of those tests is that they are timed because with purposeful thinking, you can get it all.

The hardest part of PO tests is that they are timed. However, if you practice A LOT with strategies of how to attack them, esp. block design, and picture arrangement (although this doesn’t go into your IQ), your score will go up. Practice and desire to improve should totally work given the structure of the current WAIS.[/quote]

This thread is from so long ago! Anyway, I retested last year and got different results from the test. My verbal and performance scores were about equal. The psych said that I didn’t even have LD. I didn’t believe her because of my academic history. She attributed it all to emotional problems. I had a LD coordinator at a college that I’m currently attending examine the test results. She said said that I do in fact have LD and that nobody ever gets over it.

My point is, I used to care so much about test results, but they really mean nothing to me anymore. I was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder, but when I retested I was in the high average range for auditory processing.

The tests aren’t always accurate. My scores have fluctuated over the years. I read a lot more, and I believe that’s helped my visual processing problems.

Please don’t waste your time dwelling on test scores! They aren’t always static. I obsessed over them on this board and wasted a lot of years worrying about something that’s completely inconsequential.

I still have LD issues, but it doesn’t define me anymore. Don’t let WAIS scores define you!