Picture arrangement. But you have to arrange them in the right order to tell a story.
I don’t really remember the arrangement part. I thought it would have a better name than that. Some interesting acronym or something. What does it do?
Whatever you want it to do. What does it look like to you?? (Rorschach joke)
I was afraid of that. That would explain all the serious looks.
Picture arrangement measured attention to visual detail, social skills, ability to anticipate cause & effect, & sequencing
. Kids with nonverbal learning disabilities would really struggle with it.
Speech pathologist here…a kiddo with significant language issues could also have difficulty with the picture arrangement task. So could a kid with significant cognitive issues.
Because the PA subtest can be verbally mediated, it can in some cases be less challenging for some students with NLD than some of the other IQ subtests, despite its sensitivity to social reasoning, spatial awareness and sequencing. Will have to dig out Byron Rourke’s discussion about this. Byron’s later publications, before his death, reflected his rethinking of his theories of NLD. Miss the Big Canuck, as he was affectionately called. But I digress.
Yes, I see your point. Block Design & matrix Reasoning can be more challenging since they can not by mediated by verbalization. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t as dialed into NLD back when giving WISC-III as I am now.
Byron was a fun guy. Pleasure to have known him and learned from him.
One of my kids had a WISC 42-point spread between verbal and performance. S-B was consistent with verbal score. Our pediatrician, who did a lot of behavioral work, said it was the biggest spread he’d ever seen. Performance scores were meh, and that has been reflected in reality over the years.
The spread is less meaningful at the extremes, so if, for example the split was 155-113 it would be less compelling. And I am sure your kiddo is very bright. My s’s had notable v/p splits also.
Many ears ago I did some consulting with a psychologist who had done testing for the court system. He told me a profile he would see in sociopaths was high Picture Arrangement / low Comprehension. He theorized that they knew what the social norm was & demonstrated that knowledge when looking at situations pertaining to other people (Picture Arrangement), but did not think the social norm pertained to them, which was demonstrated on Comprehension, where many of the questions require resonses that make the subject put themselves into social situations.
@csdad said:
My son took the WISC-IV in fifth grade and had a 136 verbal and a 94 processing speed. As best I can figure the only damage he has suffered from the low processing speed is that he has done relatively poorly on some IQ tests.
When we transferred to a new school he was given the Raven’s for children as a “screener” and had a perfect score, which translates to a nonverbal IQ of 136+. He then took the Reynolds and had a 135 verbal and 105 nonverbal, for an “IQ” of 121, which was too low to be placed in the gifted class. The bird-brains who gave him the tests were too hard of thinking to understand that these discrepancies rendered the tests completely invalid (as the testing protocols clearly state).
FWIW, my son just made a 34 on the ACT and I think he has a good chance of making a 35 or maybe even a 36 before December 2017. Sadly, the dull people who operated my son’s school simply cannot grasp that it is virtually impossible for someone with an IQ in the 90th percentile to consistently score in the 99th percent on achievement tests. They base every decision on gifted placement on the Reynolds and nothing else. My son is in high school now so gifted classes are history, but I’m still annoyed (can you tell?).
@EarlVanDorn has your son’s grades matched his test scores? It has been my experience that the "Processing Speed " Composite, while not correlating highly with intelligence, is more predictive of “work output”. Kids with that profile typically score very high on any type of assessment, but have difficulty getting all graded assignments in. As a result classmates not as bright as they are have a higher class rank because their overall homework grade is higher.
I recall doing a Gifted testing on a young boy. He had the kind of spread that EVD was writing about. I gave some extra tests, I also scored timed and not timed, and wrote about his deliberate style slowing him down. His parents reported other OCD traits. After a year, they did move him into gifted program.
One of my kids had a lower performance than verbal score on the Wechsler. He had awful handwriting…but beside that, his academic progress was not hampered in the least.
“lower” in all relative. Most of us are better at one than the other. In the OP’s case we are talking about a 55 Performance IQ which is in the moderately disabled range.
@csdad asked about my son’s grades. At the time he applied and was rejected for the gifted program he had never made any grade other than an “A.” He had multiple Terra Nova, Iowa, and MAP test scores going back several years, almost all of which showed him to be in the 99th percentile, although there were a couple as low as 97th percentile. He had an Orleans-Hanna Algebra Readiness score of 94, which reflected a 100 on the grade-point scales and 88 on the test scale. A score of 75 or 77 is considered sufficient for enrollment in full Algebra, not to mention pre-algebra. The counselors made some quacking sounds about how he couldn’t enroll in sixth-grade pre-algebra because he hadn’t passed the “district” test the year before. I got a little snarly and at least that problem went away.
I will say that my son tends to take a lot of time to complete a math test, which I attribute to a his slow processing speed. But he’s got a 34 on the ACT as a rising junior (and a 30 as a rising ninth-grader). If that isn’t gifted, what is? Sadly, my son’s school has gifted coordinators who apparently have a very low IQ. Not a good mix in my opinion.
My wife refused to let me appeal my son’s original rejection for the gifted program because she saw the appeal and said it looked like a legal complaint. It was supposed to, and quite honestly I regret not filing it in chancery court. There is no misfortune that could befall these scumbags that would not bring me pleasure. I later filed a more “friendly” appeal that was somehow “lost.”
Interestingly enough I eventually sent an email to the state education department complaining about the various constitutional and statute violation (due process, privileges and immunities, full faith and credit, among others) and within an hour received a letter from the school district superintendent. One appeal that I had written had never been given to him. And so my son was “admitted” into the gifted program in eighth grade, by which time the program was about as useful as teats on a boar hog.
I have asperger syndrome diagnosis, I had first two grades - special education, later I was student of normal primary, secondary school and high school. Currently, I am PhD student of philosophy.
This was WISC-R. Pehaps, I made mistake in translation. Once again results.
Verbal IQ - 108
Performance IQ - 55
Overall IQ - 81
Verbal scale:
- Information - 11
- Similarities - 12
- Arithmetic - 13
- Vocabulary - 9
- Comprehension - 11
Performance scale:
- Picture completion - 1
- Picture arrangement - 8
- Block design - 2
- Object assembly - 1
- Coding - 6
Psychologists described me as: dysharmonious intellectual development, poor perceptions of details, graphomotoric difficulties, good word-concept thinking.