To Noah or anyone- what therapies increase IQ?

You might want to look into the Language Wise program put out by McGuiness. You can buy the book “Language Wise” at most bookstores, which provides activities you can do yourself at home. ReadAmerica also trains providers of Language Wise.

Nan

Mostly my son has done language therapies. His therapist would evaluate him yearly and then concentrate on one or two specific areas. One years it was verbal mazing, another year it was oral expression. She had different tricks that I wish I could be more specific about, but I don’t think she was particularly one to follow programs exactly. She just found weaknesses and tailored her teaching methods around his learning style. She was truly amazing.

I wish I could be more helpful. All we really did for him at home was make sure that we spoke clearly and directly to his face, read nightly, and buy him any book he ever showed remote interest in. And of course we made sure that people who knew what they were doing worked with him.

Of course I never really bought the low IQ. It just didn’t jibe with what I’ve seen him do, so we really didn’t raise it with the therapies, I don’t think. We just found the boy inside trying to get out.

Sue,

My son’s developmental optomotrist seems pretty confident that vision therapy as he does it will improve his IQ. This doctor takes a more global view than most addressing many sensory and cognitive issues. He addresses balancing, coordination, visual processing, and other core deficits like sequencing and visualization. He looks at the kids specific underlying deficits.
My son does well on the language component of tests but has trouble with visual motor issues so he sounds similar to your child.

The doctor’s name is Dr Moskowitz, he is in New Jersey.

Is the therapist you’re talking about a speech therapist? We’ve started private speech therapy again. Its at the University and they evaluate quarterly and work on problem areas such as listening, following directions, oral expression, etc. I expect it’ll take awhile to get up to where he should be.

We’re also taking OT. We took vision therapy for awhile. He definitely progressed but they suggested taking a break after we did 40 sessions. He is still very low in the areas of visual memory and figure ground.

I was told that when there are language problems then the IQ score is not really accurate. My son is working way above what would be expected for his IQ but I want that number to go up because it does seem to make a difference in the way teachers look at him and his abilities.

I just want to be sure I’m doing the right things and not wasting time or losing time. Thanks for everyone’s help.

Sorry I didn’t clarify. My son has had the most workouts with language therapists, although some of them referred to themselves as speech and language therapists. (What’s the difference—? No idea.) The language therapist he had in 1st through 4th grade through the public school system (of all things) was a true saint. She was probably the most responsible for my son’s improvement. We supplemented what she was doing once a week with a private therapist, and added more during the summertime. The Catch-22 of the public school system, though, is that if the kids do well and make improvements they don’t qualify for what helps them anymore. Unfortunately, he was dismissed from the language program and we lost her, so we had to go the private route.

His OT has been intermittent, I think at first just strengthening muscle tone in his hands for writing and then some gross motor excercises for balance, skipping and such. (Why is it so important to occupational therapist that kids learn to skip—? No idea—but once he learned it sure was fun for him.) He’ getting ready to start a new round of it, and I think they will be brushing him to de-sensitize him, or whatever it is that brushing is supposed to do.

Also he just finished Fast Forward, but it’s too soon to see how that helps, if it does.

Thank goodness that, at least the first time my son’s IQ was tested, the psychologist noted that she didn’t think it was necessarily accurate (not as strongly worded as I would have liked.) Even so, it usually took a couple of months for anyone who worked with him to realize he was making way more progress than his IQ indicated was possible. To almost everyone’s credit, once they figured it out, they worked hard for him. But you’re right—that stigma is there.

You sound like you are doing such a good job. My own personal experience is that it never feels like I am doing enough, that if I had just been more on the ball when he was little, or if I spent more time working with him after school, that he wouldn’t have had such a difficult time accomplishing what he has. Some things worked fantastically just by dumb luck, and other things, not so much, no matter how much hope or time I put into it. Chin up! It never seems to magically come together all at once, but at some point you stop and realize that your son has spoken a well-thought out, grammatically correct sentence of complex thought, or even more amazingly, idiomatically correct slang, and you have a peaceful, worry-free moment.

I am interested in what you are doing with vision therapy. This hasn’t been suggested to us yet. Visual memory (I believe, but I get the terms mixed up) is his current “area”. One of his teachers said that he was like a stroke patient—he could be shown an object, you could see the light of recognition in his eyes, but the word wouldn’t come. How is it done and what does it do?

What you are describing is a RAN rapid automatic naming issue. At least that is what it sounds like. You may want to ask Laura some questions on this topic. She knows tons about this particular issue because it is one of her son’s problems.

I think someone was talking about a program that is rather specific to this problem on the homeschooling board. Also, I think audiblox is good for visual memory.

IQ tests visual memory, visual sequencing/planning, auditory memory, vocabulary, general knowledge, and grasp of middle class social mores. The important things are the subscales, which will tell you where to aim remediation. If you have deficits in visual issues, this will greatly debase your performance IQ. If you have deficits in auditory issues (or got side-tracked into a low performing group where you were not exposed to rich vocabulary) then you will have a low verbal IQ. If you have deficits in one alone the school will give you a label of LD and a few assists. If you have deficits in both, you get the MR label and the school will wash their hands of you.

The things to do are to first check out visual processing (www.vision3D.com will get you the name of a provider near you who (probably) understands this. Then get him tested specifically for central auditory processing disorder (regular audiograms do not work). I would try posting your name and city on the “parenting a child with Learning disorders bulletin board) and asking for names of an audiologist who understands it (most do not) close to you. Then call them and ask “how many children with CAPD have you tested?” Ten would be good. Once you have a diagnosis, you can either go to them for remediation, prognosis, and the fee would be variable, or you could try, like many of the parents on this forum to remediate them at home yourself with at home Fastforward (www.scilearn.com), at home vision aerobics and visual exercises (www.visionaerobics.com)see also Jenny’s great posts on visual exercises on parenting a child with learning disorders etc., and use the professional for testing to see how you are doing. If auditory or visual Memory is an issue, then this should be sepcifically stretched. (I liked the brainbuilder program at www.advancedbrain.com). PACE and audiblox are similar to the good old fashioned thinking skills (www.thinkingskills.com) and are similar to Reuben Feurenstein’s Instrumental Enrichment. Feurenstein was an Israei who worked with children coming out of the Holocaust camps. Almost all of them tested in the severely mentally retarded range - a combination of starvation, terror, and lack of stimulation. He very aggressively set up a program for teaching them every skill from sequencing up. It was workbook based, extremely intensive for for child and teacher, and much to the surprise of prevaling wisdom was effective. It was then expanded to other children with mental retardation including Down’s children with similar improvements. You can get his (quite readable) book from Amazon entitled “Don’t Accept Me as I am”.

My guess is that the current average IQ of 100 (which has been drifting upwards under the pace of a widely literate culture and has had to be renormed a couple of times) could be brought up by at least 30 points over baseline by individually tailored interventions. Take the WISC III instrument, for example. This IQ test is probably the most commonly used one for testing kids. It consists of two parts, a verbal and a performance part. Each part has six subsets. The verbal portion involves the following:

VERBAL

(1) Information - This purports to test fund of general knowledge, and requires factual knowledge, long-term memory, and recall. This attempts to measure how much general information the child has learned from school and at home. Obviously, if your child doesn’t learn easily in classroom settings and never gets new knowledge over time by other means, this will drop. Equally obviously, it will rise with a decent education (of which most ld kids are deprived by virtue of spending time going over basics in their pull-out programs.) So if you give your child the education she is otherwise missing, this part of the score will rise. Recall means that if your kid has crummy word finding, he or she will score poorly on this, but again, word finding is something which can be drilled into improvement.

(2) Similarities - Targets verbal abstract reasoning, and requires abstract reasoning, verbal categories and concepts. The child decides how things are different or alike. Again, this is something which can be improved by focussed work. The exercises laid out in the book Language Wise www.readamerica.net are very good for this. Vocabulary exercises, similarities, analogies, differences, etc. are useful, especially if the child is forced to either recite or write his response.

(3) Arithmetic - (Purports to measure numerical reasoning, and involves attention and short-term memory for meaningful information; Attention and concentration, numerical reasoning.) This is not pencil-and-paper arithmetic. Rather, it purports to measure verbal mathematical reasoning skills by giving the child oral problems to solve. Thus, if your child has a crappy auditory short-term memory (real common among kids with CAPD, who nearly always have trouble reading), then this will be artificially low. Attentional issues will obviously also impact this, as will never having learned your math facts due to poor schooling.

(4) Vocabulary - Knowledge of word meanings. This involves language development, word knowledge, verbal fluency. The child explains what a word means by defining or describing what it does. The dictionary definition is not the only acceptable answer; however it should be understood that verbose answers are GREATLY preferred, and that the customs and mores of professional-class America should at all times be kept in mind during the response. Thus, one of the questions on the WISC III asks “What is a donkey?” The response “It’s like a horse,” or “It’s a pet” each score 0 points (lowest possible) regardless of whether or not the child happens to own a pet donkey, as do quite a number of rural kids. The response “It is something you pin the tail on at a birthday party” scores 2 points (maximum possible), as does the dictionary response of “It is a member of the horse family.” Moral of the story: Teach kids to use a dictionary so they are accustomed to this sort of language, teach them to respond to test questions in a verbose fashion, and to ALWAYS use the dictionary response in answering such questions on IQ tests. (While I recommend teaching kids vocabulary for increasing their general intelligence performance) the actual vocabulary tested on IQ tests is nothing much. Test-wiseness is much more useful than knowledge in this particular area.

(5) Comprehension - This measures social comprehension and judgment. Again, social comprehension should be understood as meaning “as practiced by the American professional class.” Sample question. You are on the playground and a kid smaller and younger than you comes up to you and hits you. What should you do? The response “Smack him one upside of his hayed…” which might be appropriate in some American cultures will net you 0 points (minimum score) The response “Go and tell a teacher” will net you 1 point. The correct answer is some variant of “Walk away from him” or “Try and find out why he is acting that way”, each of which would net you 2 points, the maximum possible. Remembering the need for verbosity, it is preferable to say both. That way, if you have a borderline response on a different question, you will be more likely to get a break. Notice that obtaining the lowest possible score did not require cluelessness. Thus nobody is advocating turning cartwheels as an appropriate response to being punched, just as nobody answered “It’s a little table” in response to the question about the donkey in the previous section. Nor - from my evaluation of the testing manual - are such aberrant responses anything the designers expected to see. I’m not making this stuff up. I have seen the WISC III instrument.

(6) Digit Span - (1) Short-term auditory memory for non-meaningful information; (2) Short-term auditory memory, concentration; (3) This measures a child’s ability to remember a sequence of numbers (both backwards and forwards). Normal short term memory involves being able to remember a sequence of 7 numbers forward and 3 backward. 5 numbers forward is the lower limit of average and 9 numbers forward is the upper limit of the average range. You want to score as high as possible. Short term auditory memory can be successfully improved by Fast Forword (up to 5 digits), Earobics (up to 4 digits), Brainbuilder www.advancedbrain.com (up to 20 digits forward), and Play Attention www.playattention.com. Obtain whichever ones are most appropriate to your needs and use ‘em. ‘Nuff said.

There are also six components to the Performance portion of the IQ test. These are:

PERFORMANCE

(1) Picture Completion - This tests attention to visual detail, and requires both alertness to detail, and visual discrimination; (3) The child looks at black and white line drawings and tells the examiner what part is missing. For example, an eyebrow on a woman’s face might be absent, or a nail might be missing on a hand. Clearly, if your child is a poor artist, and is unused to performing this sort of exercise, work in this area will improve his or her score. Magazines like Highlights for Children also have little games in them which work on this area. Vision therapy www.vision3d.com for those with poor visual processing, who are drawing “stick figure” people at age nine or ten, or “squashed bug” people at age six or seven will also help them score higher on this subtest.

(2) Coding - This tests visual-motor skills, and visual motor processing speed. It requires visual-motor coordination, speed, concentration. , This section measures a child’s ability to decipher a code and copy the correct symbols in a controlled period of time. Crummy visual motor processing, poor coordination, and crummy eye teaming will do a number on this area, and conversely, improving these areas will bring up the child’s score, as will teaching him to translate in other contexts (letters to ASL or braille), etc. Also, again, advise them to work as quickly as they can without having errors. Time counts. This is also true with respect to the other performance areas.

(3) Picture Arrangement - Tests attention to visual detail, and requires sequential reasoning, planning, social logical thinking knowledge; (3) This requires a child to put pictures in order so that the story they tell makes sense. It measures their ability to create the whole from its parts. Prep for this by requiring the kid to tell stories verbally and in writing, and by cutting up comic strips and having them put them together.

(4) Block Design - Visual abstract ability, requires spatial analysis, and abstract visual problem-solving. Unlike picture arrangement, where the child is given the parts and makes up the whole, this test measures the child’s ability to look at the whole first, then break it into parts, and finally to reconstruct the whole. It provides pattern blocks and pictures, and the child must put the blocks together to re-create what’s in the picture. I suggest having the child look at quilting patterns and engage in putting together paper quilts with paper blocks to improve this area. Tanagrams and Pattern blocks (available in educational type stores) also are useful here.

(5) Object Assembly - This tests part-whole reasoning. It requires visual analysis and construction of objects. The child is given simple puzzle parts and must complete the puzzle. The puzzles are very straightforword. This test measures a child’s ability to make a whole out of its parts. Teaching strategy. Teach the child to handle jig-saw puzzles. Cut up pictures of animals and people and have them put them together. Real easy.

(6) Symbol Search - This assesses visual-motor quickness, concentration, and persistence. It is similar to the coding section, but doesn’t require the translation step. Again, the issues are visual processing, and vision therapy is what is required for people who do badly in this area.

(7) Mazes - Tests graphomotor planning, visual-motor coordination and speed, and requires fine motor coordination, planning, following directions. The child has to find the way out of a maze by using a pencil. The strategy for improving performance in this area is to teach the kid to use pencil and paper mazes. There are plenty of appropriate materials in the bookstore. If they are developmentally uncoordinated, work on that with OT.

Thanks, Shirin, I know you were responding to Linda F, but that is one of the most informative and understandable things about IQ assessment that I’ve ever read. Wow.

One of my students is being tested Monday — this is just the info his mother needs. I’m copying it and putting it into my info file.

Thank you so much for the info! My 13 year old son was tested a few weeks ago (outside of the school) and we just got the report. This is making reading the report easier. Also, anyone familiar with the success of Fast ForWord? The neuropsychologist recommend this for my son, but his school does not/will not get it. Should the school be supplying this? I am sure not only my son would benefit from the program! Hope to get a response soon!