wiat ii discrepancy

The Wisc shows her IQ and the WIAT shows her academic achievement which is what she can do with her IQ. Sounds like she bombed the IQ test and then surprise…surprise…she did much better on the Academic achievement test…so she Overachieved on the WIAT? Nah….she underachieved on the WISC-4. You have a kid who has some smarts but she isn’t consistent in her performance and what what she does with her smarts.

PRI is Perceptional Reasoning Index
Includes these subtests of the WISC-4 How well she can figure out the non verbal skills of block design, picture concepts and matrices..
Block Design
Picture Concepts
Matrix Reasoning

PSI is Processing Speed Index
Includes these subtests of the WISC-4…this one determines how well she can focus on non verbal items…
Coding
Symbol Search

So the psyche said that her PRI and PSI scores were even…but that she is good with her hands…i.e, good Manual Dexterity Skills

Again…you have a kid who is capable but she excels at being inconsistent Her BEHAVIOR is a HUGE part of this puzzle. If the behavior/ADD isn’t harnessed …you know the drill…been there done that…

thanks for the explanation.. i was surprised to see that she was in the top 98% percentile for maths and 75% for english but her iq was much
lower - 103..

good with her hands?? thats a shock - her handwriting and drawing would never suggest that!!

the psyche actually commented on the flat score between the pri and psi - that it is not typical..

again thanks pattim - you have saved me another fortune (another session with the psyche for the explanations)..

i’ve taken heed of what you have said and she is booked in to see an adhd paedatrician next month (the earliest appointment!!)..

You can be very good with your hands and still not good with drawing and writing - they are very different cognitive processes. It’s pretty common for people good with their hands to be not so good with writing.

I’m with Patti - she underachieved on the IQ. It’s an awful lot easier to underachieve than overachieve. Were there highs & lows on the subtests? She could be a lot better at following traditional directions for traditional school type tasks than at taking off in the strange directions the IQ test scores take you - and htere’s another little psychological occurence that is possibly tied to how you perceive yourself. Seems that two groups of children (I believe they were “minority” children) were given IQ tests - but one group was just told they were puzzles, the others told it was an ability test. The first group did *significantly* better.

So if she’s reasonably confident about her ability to do school stuff, but less so about her “ability” - then instead of thinking of a question as a puzzle, that *will* have an ansewr, and since it’s a puzzle there’s some interesting trick that’ll get you there, she might be thinking of it as “an ability test” and if you don’t have the “ability” to get right to the answer, you can just stop right there. (Whereas achievement tests - hey, we *know* there’s a right answer and if we’ve studied … :=))

thanks for the reply sue.. i’m happy to hear both of you say that she is underachieving not overachieving..
the high/lows on the subtest.. not many really.. the high stuff were the matrix, coding, number/letter sequencing, the low were vocabulary (16th percentile actually) and digit span (35th percentile)- the psyches commented that she performed better in the reverse digits and letters than she did in the normal format.. arithmetic was average which is strange considering she has been awarded state and national awards for maths competitions.. yet in the wiat she achieved much higher in the comprehension section which did not imply a vocabulary problem.. and also in the maths section..

in terms of puzzle vs ability testing: actually she is off and on.. she can do appalling on school tests but the next day get full marks.. with the iq test, she started well but then became impulsive and silly.. the two psyches were surprised that she could start so well, especially with the matrix, but then go on such a rapid decline to the extent that she completely switched off..
she doesn’t seem to have test anxiety and tends to do better when the task is harder and she knows she is being tested.. but then again, it depends on the day, the hour, the minute and i have no idea what else.. one of the psyches commented that my dd was more interested in what was around the room than the actual question.. she answered without any thought.. the harder questions she actually answered correctly!!!
the psyches actually thought she may have been ill, stressed or tired.. i told them that this was typical of her behaviour and that was why i was spending so much money trying to figure out why..
during the wiat ii test however, she was tired and rundown, plus had the added pressure of having to wait a few seconds before she was allowed to respond.. maybe thats why she did so much better..
my dd doesn’t have low self-esteem in relation to her intelligence - she knows she is more than capable but that she has a ‘concentration, attention, focus and impulsivity problem’.. this has been going on for years.. in actual fact she loses patience with most of the kids in her class because as she says ‘they don’t get what the teacher says’.. she gets bored and becomes silly and then can’t seem to switch back to working mode.. she also never works harder than she needs to and has no study skills..

pattim has written some excellent points - which i am taking on board.. 1st point of call, a adhd paediatrician..

Especially on the numbers reverse. It is more challenging, so they are more engaged. Also they have the ability to HYPER focus when they want and the other thing is they can tune out just as well as they can hyper focus. I have seen ADD kids who have excellent verbal skills with grammar just bomb written grammar language assessments due to inattentive mistakes. I have seen ADD kids who create wonderful stories with beautiful syntax and well developed sentences spontaneously then totally bomb when writing expository responses because they can’t organize their thoughts to put them down on paper.

It is truly fascinating when the psyches at my schools and I get together to discuss kids. Usually if I suspect ADD they are also seeing the same thing… Good luck!!