I have a seventeen year old daughter, she is a senior in HS. She is in the process of applying to colleges. She was diagnosed in 1st grade with a learning disability. Never had her retested until now for college. Can you all help me understand her test scores? She scored a IQ 91. Her verbal performance was 98 and performance score was 84. Verbal comprehension skills are 107. Perceptual organizational skills are 78. Working memory 86 and processing speed was 93. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale was used in testing my daughter. I received the test results but do not meet with the psychologist who tested her to explain the scores for another month. I want to go in there and have an idea of what he is talking about. What kind of learning disability does this indicate? What kind of accomodations should my daughter need in college to succeed? Thanks for your help!
[Modified by: lafeytaffey210 on December 07, 2008 03:20 PM]
Re: help understand scores on IQ test
You can not determine if someone has a learning disability from an IQ test alone. You must examine the discrepancy between the IQ score and academic achievement(compositve scores in Reading, Writing, Math on a standardized assessment). An identification of LD also requires a processing disorder (perhaps that low perceptual organizational score ;) compared to the overall IQ). I agree with the above post that your child’s verbal skills are better developed than nonverbal skills. The working memory on the WAIS-III is all auditory. I would remind the evaluator that the WAIS has been very recently revised to the 4th edition and to encourage their school system to purchase the new one. Typically, there is a grace period of one year before evaluators really need to switch to the new revised test.
Keep in mind that the school system must use this new testing data to help determine if your daughter meets the criteria for a learning disability. Just because your daughter met the criteria for LD before, does not mean she will show that same pattern of scores again. Also, keep in mind that colleges are not bound to uphold identification,diagnoses,recommendations, etc. from public schools or private evaluations. Given her pattern of scores, I would suggest taking advantage of any notes provided through college classes. She could tape record her lectures and play them back since auditory memory may be an issue. College students have more opportunites for exchanging copies of notes than in h.s. as well as opportunities to study with one another to prepare for exams. Encourage her to take advantage of any extra assistance offered through the college. There are often free tutoring programs, etc.
Your dd struggles with visually presented, non-verbal reasoning information. (ie. she has trouble visually processing information) You should google the WISC test and see if you can find a site that explains each of the subtests and what you had to do on each of them. For example, the Block design requires spatial processing, visual-motor coordination and the ability to apply all skills in a quick, efficient manner.
Her working memory is also a struggle for her. To accurately test working memory it would be interesting to know if the information was presented auditorily, visually or both? My hunch is that she probably did well with auditory, but poorly with visual. My dd had a working memory test done once where she scored average on it. But the tester told me that she missed ALL the auditory questions and most (above avg) of the visual ones were correct.
You may want to also look into NVLD and see if that fits your dd’s profile. I would also check to see if she has any visual disorders such as tracking, convergence etc.
Hard to say what kind of accomodations without knowing more specifically what kind of problems she has with school. Overall she probably does better when information is presented auditorily to her vs. visually.