My daughter is 11 years old & in 5th grade. She is on an IEP currently and will go thru her 3 year testing this coming January. She scored a 76 on her Verbal/and a 77 on her performance on her WISC III testing. She has always had reversals and numerous problems with spelling and reading. Also scored very low in her oral expression. (She attempted to read a couple pages of a 4th grade reader and pronounced the same words appearing on both pages about 4 different ways..example Blackie was pronounced blake.. blakie..blackie…or labrador was pronounced labor day, laboror, labored). (Now imagine homework in Social Studies where she has to find the answers to questions hidden amoungest the pages of text) I went and seen a lady at a clinic here to have her tested for dyslexia and was advised that due to my daughters performance and verbal test scores she didn’t believe that dyslexia was the culprit as dyslexics have a high performance and a low verbal score. My question is….is it possible to have dyslexia and not score average..or above average on the performance part of the testing?? It terrifys me to see my child struggle so hard with reading, spelling and comprehension and not know if I could make her life easier. I pray someone has some answers for me as I have found myself not knowing where to get the answers to my questions… Thank you! May you all be so very blessed…as I have been…with God’s gift to me….my child.
Re: WISCIII&Dyslexia eval question
I am not sure I see that they did the subtests. She did score a 99 in her listening area on the testing….they noted twice she did best on the testing when listening to the questions. Her Oral expression catagory earned her a 66. I don’t see any phonemic awarness areas or visual processing scores or tests on wisc three scores. One huge fear of mine is that she gets so much assistance from us/her parents and the school w/school work that all her grades are great. Other than spelling. Her comprehension tests they have been reading her the story, and read her the questions and answers and then she does well on them as well. My real question is how much is she really keeping and learning. Next year she goes to middle school and I am so afraid she will get lost in the dust. I really want them to find ways to have her be an independant learner. I don’t know how to do that though. I am going to print your email and bring it with when she goes through her annual IEP testing again as possibly these are additional tests that should have been done.
Re: WISCIII&Dyslexia eval question
I dont know how well the WISC III is suppose to help “categorize” a student. It is usually used in conjunction with an achievement test such as the WIAT. The WISC tests ability and an achievement test tests what has been learned. For example my 9 year old PDD-NOS son was tested with the WISC III and the WIAT. From his scores they were able to determine he has average ability to learn. He did have the performance vs verbal discrepency. Verbal IQ 82, performance 104, for a FSIQ of 92. This helped the school to see that his performance IQ was much greater then his verbal meaning he would have more difficulty with reading and other language based tasks. On the WIAT he scored a SS of 68 on reading, 75 on Writing, and 101 on math. This showed a discrepency beteween his ablitity and his achievement. With this information they were able to develop an IEP to meet his specific needs. I hope this information helps, good luck.
The”classic dyslexic” — usually a boy — has a high performance, low verbal score. Girls wiht dyslexia often have specific verbal strengths as well as weaknesses that mean you have to look more closely at subtests on the WISC, and look at things like phonemic awareness and auditory processing and visual processing. Actually, recent research has indicated that IQ and how easily reading is learned are just not that connected; Reid Lyon mentioned this some years ago when the NIH was just getting into figuring out the predictors for reading success. IQ was not a good one; phonemic awareness was a really good one, and rapid automatic naming of stuff another. So the “brilliant dyslexic” prototype is just one model. My godchild is very dyslexic… and her IQ scores hover around 70, somewhat depressed by her reliance on expression & tone instead of language — so those “standardized” directions on IQ tests leave her *clueless* because it’s only the words that count, the lady says “okay” after whatever answer so she thinks she’s doing great and doesn’t take the extra effort she needs to process the words.
Frankly, this is probably not a kid who benefits much from “look at these words and find the words that look sort of like them and copy them” work… not if they want her to learn and understand what’s happening in the world around her.
Were there highs & lows in those subtest scores? And were other diagnostic tests done? The WISC doesn’t hone in on the reading skills, just the thinking and language skills that go along with it.