Article on the Vagaries of Early Childhood Intelligence Tests as Indicators of Giftedness

[Anonymous]

http://nymag.com/news/features/63427/

[Anonymous]

It seems as if my very intelligent but resolutely uncooperative 4 year-old knows this already - he makes a point of never answering "test-like" questions and loves to watch us and his teachers squirm

When I'm especially frustrated with him, I remember that his critical sense and eagerness to do things his own way will probably stand him in good stead as an adult, but it certainly won't be through a famous school... at least, not until college!

[Anonymous]

Very interesting..thanks for sharing. Just to share my experience..my daughter tested for Pre-K and her overall WPPSI was 50th percentile (TERRIBLE) and this year for K her overall was 92% thats a HUGE jump and we did nothing different. No prepping was done for either year. It just goes to show that the test means nothing!! I see no big differences in her other than she is a bit more mature.

[Anonymous]

Posted a thread about NurtureShock just last week regarding this phenomenon. It's interesting information to have.

[Anonymous]

Very interesting article. My 4 yr old is definitely in the camp that would get bored with such a lengthy test and start asking the examiner, "Hmmm. I don't know. What do YOU think?"

[Anonymous]

I agree that these tests are not very good predictors of future academic talent and success. Many smart kids will not get good scores.

However, the scores do help as an indicator of school readiness for a school that would like to fill a class with kids that can concentrate on a task and sit still. A smart child that can do that will get a high score; an average child that can sit still will get an average score. Unfortunately, the future genius that cannot yet sit still and focus will get a score that reflects less than their full potential. But the school gets some information that is useful for their decision in terms of who to admit. Is it fair? I don't know, probably not. But I do like that my kid who does know how to sit still and pay attention does not spend much of her day waiting for other kids to settle down, and as a result she is learning lots of math concepts and learning to read and write, with lots of play time and other enrichment during the day.

[Anonymous]

I thought this part of the article nicely summed up the point that while these tests definitely are not perfect predictors, they're pretty impressive nevertheless:

In 2006, David Lohman, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, co-authored a paper called “Gifted Today but Not Tomorrow?” in the Journal for the Education of the Gifted, demonstrating just how labile “giftedness” is. It notes that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or above on the Stanford-Binet would do so on another, similar IQ test at the same point in time. Combine this with the instability of 4-year-old IQs, and it becomes pretty clear that judgments about giftedness should be an ongoing affair, rather than a fateful determination made at one arbitrary moment in time. I wrote to Lohman and asked what percentage of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds. He answered with a careful regression analysis: about 25 percent. The implications of this number are pretty startling. They mean that three quarters of the seniors in a gifted program would no longer test into that program if asked to retake an IQ test on graduation day. So I wrote Lohman back: Was he certain about this? “Yes,” he replied. “Even people who consider themselves well versed in these matters are often surprised to discover how much movement/noise/instability there is even when correlations seem high.” He was careful to note, however, that this doesn’t mean IQ tests have no predictive value per se. After all, these tests are better—far better—at predicting which children will have a 130-plus IQ at 17 than any other procedure we’ve devised. To have some mechanism that can find, during childhood, a quarter of the adults who’ll test so well is, if you think about it, impressive. “The problem,” wrote Lohman, “is assigning kids to schools for the gifted on the basis of a test score at age 4 or 5 and assuming that their rank order among age mates will be constant over time.”

I think the 25% figure (while dramatic for the story) might be a little misleading. Lohman does not seem to be suggesting that the tests are accurate only 25% of the time and worthless 75% of the time -- I suspect that he'd predict that most of the 75% of 4-year-olds who previously scored 130+, but would not later repeat that feat, would nevertheless score higher than average. At another point, the NYMag article suggests that a given child's score might fluctuate 10 points up or down over time. That's about 10% in each direction. To me at least, it seems pretty amazing that a test could remain accurate to 10% over time.

Very interesting stuff. Thanks for posting, OP.

[Anonymous]

For an interesting read about the history of and use for IQ tests, see the late, great Stephen Jay Gould's "Mismeasure of Man".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

http://nymag.com/news/features/63427/

Very interesting article. It's what I've been telling people for years around NYC. There is so much uncertainty when testing these kids at that young age and I saw it myself with my currently 8th grade son.

It is reassuring, though, that the author's raw data about college matriculation does agree with what I show on my website: http://matriculationstats.org

But when the author talks about schools like Trinity and Dalton, she doesn't really make her point so clearly. It is well known that many of the children who enter those (and other) schools in K do not graduate from 12th grade there. Many move to other schools through their own volition (family relocations, desire for a change, etc), but many others are "counseled out". I suspect the same thing goes on in the DC area. In addition to the unreliability of the testing process at that age, there's also the fact that admissions at that age has more to do with the parents than the child. As a child ages, that allocation shifts from the parents to the child, though never completely (one can still buy one's way into any college through money or parental prestige - would any college ever have turned down the Bush twins or Chelsea Clinton? - but the cost or threshold gets higher and higher as a child gets older).

So, the kids from Trinity and Dalton who do well in the college sweepstakes may be predominantly the ones who entered at 6th or 9th grades (the most common entry points for those schools). Or maybe not. But the author ignores the issue.

[Anonymous]

... and the article includes direct quotations from an old DCUM thread about buying Aristotle's Circle to prepare for the WPPSI. too funny!