Yup, the IEP Process is Rough All Around

The Atlantic's Tracy Thompson just wrote an article that I had a little trouble getting through. Ms. Thompson details her struggles with getting good programming for her daughter, who requires special education, and all of he hurdles and interpersonal struggles she encounters with the schools system. Working from the other end, I have to agree with her. It stinks. 

When an IEP is set up, or as a school psychologist I make recommendations, we constantly bump up against the limits of what we can do. Districts have fewer and fewer resources and more and more paperwork and demands on their time. Parents want what is best for their children, so sometimes the demands increase. In the article, Ms. Thompson mentions school staff suggesting placements for her daughter that sound like they won't help. The sad fact is, they may have just been all that they had to offer her.

What worries me, not so much when reading this article, but reading more adversarial articles is that I get a feeling from parents that they think school is always holding out on them. When a parent asks that their child be evaluated, and I respond that the student's grades are high enough that there is no chance that he or she needs special education, it's never because I just don't feel like doing work. There's always a lot of needs. Our resources don't go up with demand like in a for-profit business, so we may not have anything to offer, or we may be desperately trying to make sure we have enough resources for students who need the most support. For every child who is reading a little more slowly in the first grade, there may be another in the fifth grade who can barely read at all. 

What does this mean if you are a parent? Well, first of all, I can't give professional advice over a blog. I don't know the exact policies or resources of your school district and I don't know the exact needs of your child. I would like to suggest though that as parents you talk to people in your school district as people. Maybe talk and learn, as much as you can, with a few people on your team and really understand their position and end up on the same side. I can only speak from my experience in this area, but I think that mutual empathy has ended up really helping more than one student as we've tried to figure out what to do for them: both what we should do and what we can do. In the meantime, Ms. Thompson and every other parent out there has my sympathies.  

How can we get more minority students into Gifted & Talented Programs?

The answer, as with most things in education, is money. Vox recently reported on a study of a large, diverse school district that changed the way it tested students for admission to their Gifted and Talented (G&T) program. As with most districts, this one waited for teachers to refer first or second grade students, and then these students were admitted based on an IQ test and other measures from district psychologists. Teachers, however, referred a larger number of white, middle and upper class students. When the district changed their approach and screened all students (regardless of teacher referral) with a shorter test, then there was a massive increase in the number of minority students admitted to the G&T program. Great, until the recession hit, the budget was cut and the universal screening program and the additional testing it required were cut from the budget. Now, the levels of minority students in the G&T program are back to where they were before the universal screening was implemented. 

The biggest takeaway is that doing write by students just costs money. There is certainly an indication that there is work to be done getting teachers to recognize gifted minority students since if they were referred at a higher level then more would be admitted. However, even if the teachers referred more, if there aren't enough psychologists to test them (and in a diverse district the psychologists are also likely doing a lot of evaluation for Special Education as well) then it doesn't matter who is referred. I am also worried about the budget means for those students actually in the G&T programs. Is there enough money to give them a challenging program? Is the district stuck with trying to meet the needs of its diverse students (providing for students with Disabilities, providing for English Language Learners) and has nothing left for Gifted Students? It's worrying and my heart goes out to all of the teachers and parents of students for whom there is just not enough to go around.  

No, how you eat pizza does not say anything about your personality.

A doozy of a thing went viral this week. A body language expert, Patti Wood, told Cosmopolitan Magazine that the way you eat pizza can tell a lot about your personality. http://www.cosmopolitan.com/food-cocktails/news/g4973/pizza-personality-reveal/ Specifically, she states that there are four ways to eat, each associated with a different personality type. I am not familiar enough with Ms. Wood’s larger body of work to comment on whether she might have some expertise to offer in other areas, but her pizza hypothesis is a pretty good example of bad pop psychology, and I kind of viral story that we should probably just ignore. 

First, people are not types. Vox http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personality-test-meaningless has done good work a few times pointing out shortcomings of the Myers-Briggs test and one of the big ones is that even if you’re type XYZ today, you might take the same test and be type ABC tomorrow. This is one of the reasons why the kinds of personality tests that are used in research and clinical applications (such as the “Big Five” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits) focus a lot more on saying how much of a trait you have, and not whether you are this or that. In other words, if I take a test Monday, and am in the 51st percentile for extraversion, and then take it Tuesday and I’m in the 49th, we’re still working in the same ballpark and can say that this trait is right in the middle for me (maybe it’s a little different because of my mood). If I take it Monday and I’m an “extrovert” and then Tuesday and I’m an “introvert,” I have apparently shown a fundamental shift in who I am. The pizza test uses types, and a measure that will change from minute to minute if I eat my first slice of pizza folded, and then my second slice crust first.

The other big problem is that when you say something indicates something else, you need to show it. There is a big enough set of research on IQ tests that when I give one, I know that a person who gets a certain score should then get a close score on an achievement test and that if they don’t, something might be wrong (such a learning disability). Some research with The Big Five shows interesting findings like people with high openness being more tolerant of people with different beliefs. There is no research in correlates of pizza eating behaviors. I’d need at least a few times where the person who eats their pizza crust first (does anyone?) are actually anything that could be described as an “influencer.”  

I’m not that worried about this article about pizza, but I am worried by how much it looks like a lot of other articles that get passed around. This is a case where we have someone identified as an expert who says something that is uncritically passed around by news and blogs. In Ms. Woods’ defense, she does appear to point out that it’s not really a great measure of personality, but not every news outlet that passed the story along bothered to do the same. It’s the same mechanism that has people treating their children’s ADHD with St. John’s wort, or denying that it exists at all. The same goes for astrology and “what your name says about you” quizzes. Whether cute or serious, it is always worth thinking a bit more about these viral stories, and maybe not bothering to pass them along.   

Actually Looking at Common Core Math

I've seen a lot of things that end up as punching bags or punchlines based on rumors or funny pictures, and common core math is one that I've seen hit harder than most. At least two people I know on Facebook (neither of whom works in education) posted a picture of a panicked looking cat with the caption "Common Core Math: IF YOU HAVE 4 PENCILS AND 7 APPLES, HOW MANY PANCAKES WILL FIT ON THE ROOF? PURPLE. BECAUSE ALIENS DON'T WEAR HATS." Actually seeing some of these problems, I can confirm that they are more complex than ones I remember from elementary school, but that they do make sense. NPR has posted an excellent summary of some expert opinion on Common Core Math. i'll admit that I have concerns about testing students on computers and other aspects of the tests reviewed in the article, but if you've heard only second hand reports of wacky pancake-based problems, go ahead and give it a read and look at a few actual problems. I'm happy to see some application and complex reasoning working their way into these early problems.  

We Need A Lot More Psychology Majors

I don't want to get too political, but when a presidential candidate comes after my major, I am glad when someone rises to our defense. Recently, Jeb Bush felt the need to declare that psychology majors end up working fast food. He's wrong. I worked a few jobs before going back to grad school and not one involved making sandwiches to order. Bigger than that though, as Professor Saxby points out in the link, there really is a need for mental health care. I encourage you to give it a read, but as we think about the cries for more mental health care and more support in schools, I hope we can all agree that we need to not make fun of people who want to do those jobs. 

Question: Why Can't You Just Tell us What's on the Tests?

If a book existed that had the questions on a test, then that test would become useless. The score for a test is based on comparing a test-taker’s results to a the results for a large number of people the same age called “the normative sample” (think of them as a bunch of people who can show us what the “norm” is for performance on the tests). When the normative sample takes the test, it's the first time they've ever seen the questions and puzzles on the test. Every score that's compared to their scores needs to also be from someone who has never seen them before, or else that person's results are not valid. If anyone studies for an IQ test, that test is useless. That's a big deal by the way.

A student who needs services for the Intellectually Disabled should get them. There have been issues historically with students ending up there who didn't belong, but a child who needs that kind of specially designed instruction should be with teachers who are trained to help and teach them. A child who does not need support for the Gifted and is only in such a program due to seeing a test early may not be on the level of other students who get there honestly. It's also important to keep in mind that IQ tests are not only given for educational placement. They are also often administered after a brain injury, and if someone had been exposed to a test previously, then it could mask an injury, or force them to take additional hours of difficult testing.

Finally, there is a legal doctrine of test security. Remember that the publishers who make IQ tests invest a lot of time and money in their creation. In court, it has repeatedly been established that they can protect their investment by keeping the test secure. If there is something that can be done (in this case making the tests public) that renders a product useless, then it's pretty reasonable for the maker of that product to want to protect it. When the product (IQ tests) is so important, then I'm glad our courts prevent this from happening.    

Question: How young is too young to evaluate a child?

There is no hard and fast cut off, but I am very hesitant to evaluate a child before he or she reaches second grade and maybe seven or seven and a half. Before this age, it’s very difficult to interpret test results for a few reasons. For one thing, the expectations in reading and math are pretty basic, so every test item can have a huge impact on score. For example, if a six-year-old misses two words on a reading test, there are certain times when this will result in a drop in score to the level that looks like a disability. This might be nothing, however, since it could be caused by a common mistake like mixing up “d” and “b” or not understanding silent “e” on the end of a word. These are often just something it take a student a few times to understand, and when he or she does, then a reading score could increase dramatically. I see these big jumps in performance after a “Eureka” moment all the time. I also see a lot of first grade readers who forget a rule occasionally. If this is still happening much later, then it’s a good reason to test.

Expectations are also low enough that sometimes a student can’t get a very low score. Imagine that on a given test, the average six-year-old gets five items correct. Since tests are scored based on the typical performance of a test taker at a given age, this can often mean that getting only one or even no items correct is still not a very low score. If twenty percent of test-takers get no items correct (which is only five items off of the Average) then a raw score of zero, would still keep a child in the twentieth percentile in the Average or Low Average range.

Finally, there’s just a lot of development that happens in the first few years of school and life. I’ve given attention tests to very young children before, and at first was always amazed how poorly they appeared to do. Very young children really do have poor memories, bad attention spans and are not very good at most cognitive tasks. However, when I’ve scored these kids, they are almost always just average. It’s simply typical for children in Kindergarten and first grade to have short attention spans, make lots of mistakes and have trouble figuring things out. These will all improve rapidly, but usually when I’ve had to evaluate children at five or six, the real reason for their difficulty is that they are five or six.

It’s also best to save an evaluation so that it can be given appropriately when the time is right. If a child is tested at six, and then again just a little while later, there can be a learning effect. It might not be dramatic, but just a little familiarity with a certain kind of task or puzzle can impact performance enough to throw off the results. Ironically, testing a child too early can create a situation where when we test him or her at the right time, the actual issue won’t show up. This is all on top of all of the class (often one or two days) that a child is going to miss due to evaluation. 

Question: What’s Taking so Long?

This is a tricky thing to address, but I feel like I need to since it comes up so often. A lot of parents will submit paperwork for their child to be evaluated by their school district or Intermediate Unit, and then the waiting starts. Officially, once a consent is signed, the district has sixty days to conduct and evaluation, but it does (depending on the district and how exactly you ask) take time to get the consent to sign. The end result is that sometimes, there is a wait of several months before a child is evaluated. This stinks. Children are not usually referred for no good reason and there is no worse feeling than telling panicked parents and teachers that they have to wait a while. So, I am often asked, not unreasonably, what is taking so long.

One factor is that it just takes a while to perform a good evaluation. Giving an IQ test takes an hour or two (longer for very bright students and older students). Achievement testing can take even longer, closer to two to four hours, with students going through long sets of math problems and reading long passages for comprehension. Most Evaluations will also include a clinical interview and further testing such as attention. Finally, there’s components in addition to testing like talking to teachers, waiting for paperwork and records and observing the student. After all of the information is gathered, then we need to write up the ten to twenty pages and try to make it easy to read. This is all necessary to make sure we do enough to determine a child’s needs and make a good plan to help, so there’s a minimum time each evaluation will take. This is of course compounded by a much bigger problem; there just aren’t enough school psychologists.

The National Association of School Psychologists recommends that there be one school psychologist for every 1,000 students in a district. Most districts have between 1,500 to 2,000 students for every school psychologist http://www.nasponline.org/publications/cq/cq288sp2000.aspx. In other words, the average school psychologist is doing about one and a half to twice as money evaluations as they should be. This is worse in districts with high needs, where there is likely less budget to hire school psyches and likely more students needing evaluation. The end result is that students and parents find themselves at the back of a line that is much longer than any of us would like. Sadly, there is not much to be done about speeding things up.

Hypothetically, we could try to speed up evaluations, but I don’t like what that would mean. I could cut out some testing, but I don’t want to miss anything. I could try to reject more evaluations (and certainly every so often a student is so obviously excelling that I do reject them), but if a child needs help enough that he or she is referred to me, then I want to help. The end result is that, sadly, there is often a long wait for an evaluation.

Question: Why do we need to use the term "Disability"?

This question can come up many different places, but since the term "disability" is part of every Educational Evaluation, I'm going to address that aspect of it. I’ve had this posed to me several ways by teachers, parents and children. I’ve had adorable saying come along with it like “labels are for jelly jars” and heartfelt pleas of “do you really think I have a disability?” The short answer to why we need to use such a term is, “because that’s how the law works.” Whether supports or accommodations come as part of Special Education or a 504 plan, they only come because a student has been found to have a disability. I have said more than once that if the only way to get a child the help he or she needs was to have them legally declared a horse, then I’d start the paperwork to have them legally declared a horse. There we go. Mystery solved and we can all go home, right?

That is one answer and sometimes it’s enough. I think the bigger issue here, is what the terms we use mean. Under the “American with Disabilities Act,” the term “disability” is defined basically as any impairment that interferes with a major part of your life (http://www.ada.gov/pubs/adastatute08.htm#12102). I always had the feeling that it was meant to be pretty innocuous and say little more than “if you need help, then you can’t be discriminated against for it.” What is unfortunate, though, is that I get the feeling that for a lot of people, there’s a value judgement attached to the term. I have had parents and children both object to being referred to as someone “with a disability,” whether it’s a learning disability or ADHD or even visual impairment. Sometimes, it appears to be the imprecise nature of the term since a person with a profound level of mental and physical impairment and a person who has trouble with math can both be found to have “a disability.” Other times, some parents and teachers worry that any label can become an excuse.

All of this is why, when I get asked this or related questions, the first response is always to ask back, “what does ‘disability’ mean to you?” A lot of the conversations I have after that speak to the fact that when different people use that term, they mean different things. Like a lot of words that carry an emotional charge, this one will mean different things to different people. They may have heard it different places and from people who meant all manner of things. It’s also really significant how much the consequences that follow being determined to have a disability have changed. Many parents worry that being found to have a disability means that their child will be removed from the regular education classroom or be excluded from other activities. It makes me wish there were other terms to use, or even better, that after evaluating a child, I could just say “here are my recommendations for this student,” with no regard for exactly what category, or what disability may or may not be present. Some services are reaching this point, with more and more school districts establishing supports like extra reading help that they provide as soon as a student falls behind without the need for a disability. Maybe someday, we’ll see more movement in the area. Until then, we are stuck with the terms we use, and everyone (psychologists, parents, children) will benefit from a talk about what “disability” means to them and means for their education.  

 

Warning: Very Tough Post to Read

I struggled with how to start this, because it’s so hard not to understate how bad this is. A professor of Psychology used a technique that has been widely and consistently discredited to assume consent from a young man with an IQ too low to consent, and then rape him.

I’ll share a link with more information at the end, but here’s the important parts. Rutgers Psychology Professor Anna Stubblefield was working with a young man identified as “DJ.” DJ has a host of disabilities including Cerebral Palsy and Intellectual Disability. He’s unable to talk, and between that and his very limited intellectual ability means that he is unable to give consent to sex. Without language and without the ability to comprehend what is happening to him or learn more about it, DJ cannot consent to sex any more than he could consent to a loan. This makes it Professor Stubblefield’s actions rape. There’s another layer of embarrassment for me and everyone else with a PhD in Psychology.

Facilitated communication is a technique whereby a person (a “facilitator”) “helps” an individual with a significant disability to write or type. Supposedly, the individual is able to think (often in surprisingly advanced prose) but is unable to move his or her hands or fingers accurately. The fact is that any time this has been tested, it has been found that responses are coming from the facilitator. If you show the person being “helped,” “1+1=?” and show the facilitator, “2+2=?” then the response will be “4.” I don’t think the facilitator is generally doing this on purpose, but there is now a large body of research saying that this technique is not to be used (we can actually go back over twenty years http://www.apa.org/divisions/div33/fcpolicy.html). It very much appears that while people with profound disabilities can connect to people and can be wonderful parts of families, there is no evidence that they all have hidden abilities to read and write.

Professor Stubblefield’s actions took a particularly bad turn, but they’re not unique in this case. There have also been cases where facilitators have been convinced that their clients are reporting sexual abuse http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wendrows-sex-abuse-cases-dismissed-facilitated-communication/story?id=15274276. While these are now reliably dismissed, this was not always the case. This gives a ringer of an example of why it is important for practitioners and parents to pay close attention to research. The fact that this happened to a psychologist shows just how hard this can be, but her current and unfolding trial are a very big reminder of why it’s so critical.

For updates on the case: http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2015/09/professor_rejects_claim_she_raped_disabled_man.html

For a thorough review of the evidence against Facilitated Communication: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/facilitated-communication-persists-despite-scientific-criticism/

What is the Average IQ?

I'm so excited to answer this one because I'm asked it so much! On all modern IQ tests, the average is 100. This is calculated such that for every age, the average is always 100, even though the expectations of the test go up. The large majority of people will score between 85 and 115, so anything within these is pretty typical and all that you need.

By the way, this also means that the rumors swirling around the internet of who has an IQ "Over 200!" and whatnot, are probably false. Up past 137 or 138 we're all ready splitting the top 1% into tiny little bits, so it just becomes statistically improbable that this many celebrities and children have actually scored that high.   

Philadelphia Schools

During grad school, a lot of my classes had us in the Philadelphia schools, tutoring, counselling or otherwise trying to help. I would talk to people I know about what I saw inside and while some were sympathetic, there was also often a question of why the district just can't pull itself together. Can't they hire better teachers? Or figure out how to keep the kids under control? The issue really is that there just aren't the resources to serve and support of all the students who attend. Students in poverty tend to need academic help, their neighborhood stress them out and their parents often work whenever they can and so can't help as much as they'd like. As a result, even grad students assigned to schools were spread thin.  

The situation has gotten worse as the money per pupil available in Philadelphia has be reduced. Last year, two students died at schools who only had part-time nurses due to the lost money. This year, the schools are crowded, classes are ever bigger and there aren't nearly enough teachers. There isn't much to be done other than try to convince the Pennsylvania legislature not to give up on these kids, but I had to share when some of these schools were such a big part of my life for so long. If you live in Pennsylvania, please consider contacting your state rep or state senator and urging them to pass a budget that restores funding to schools. If you need to find your representative's contact information, you can click here These kids will grow up to be your neighbors one way or another, so if you want them to be good neighbors, we need to give them a chance. 

What's it Like to Take an IQ Test?

I remember taking my IQ test pretty well. I can't remember the name of the School Psychologist, but I recall that it was a middle-aged man with a beard and a sweater (for some reason, every male school psychologist I've ever met eventually developed a fondness for sweaters and beards) and I remember some parts of the test. I also remember thinking that I did very poorly.

Don't misunderstand that last part. The gentleman who administered the test was a warm, friendly kind of guy and definitely encouraged me, but there is a funny thing about taking an IQ test; they don't stop until you get a lot of questions wrong. I put together some puzzles and then suddenly, there was one that was way too hard. The next one was even harder. I became aware that I was getting a lot of them wrong and, being a smart kid and not at all used to messing things up, I was starting to get upset. In giving a test, however, it's important to get a picture of how much a student can do. This means that testing does not stop until a student hits a "Ceiling," usually three to five questions in a row wrong. A lot of psychologists I know will warn kids about this by pointing out that tests are often given to kids over a wide age range, so they shouldn't worry if they get to the end and they get the last few wrong ("those are for high school or college kids").

Aside from hitting a Ceiling though, I can say that taking an IQ test is usually fun. The student will go with the School Psychologist administering the test somewhere quiet and after some time chatting and making sure today is a good day for some hard work, they will get started. Most tests for kids start out with their most colorful and interesting subtest (a lot of them use toys and pictures) and there will be a totally different thing to do every few minutes, so I've never had a student complain they were bored (although I'm sure at least a few teenagers will insist that they totally were). The variety also means that even when a subtest is hard for a student, it's usually over pretty fast and they can feel good about their performance on the next one. For some students, I might use stickers or Gummi Bears to help motivate them to work hard, but for most, I can rely on my knowledge of cartoons and ponies to keep them engaged and make sure they do their best.   

As for the tests themselves, they don't look much like other tests. Each full IQ test will be divided into about six to ten subtests. Each subtest is distinct and meant to measure a specific ability. For some, the examiner will just ask questions or (as on some tests of Short-Term Memory) say information the person taking the test has to remember. Other tests will have pictures in a book or on cards. Finally, some tests will have blocks or puzzle pieces that the student has to physically assemble. Before each of the subtests, the examiner reads some standardized instructions to the test taker. It's a skill to get good at saying these (so you don't sound like you're reading) but everyone has to hear the same thing before they take the test so that the quality of the instructions you give doesn't influence someone's performance.    

Charter School in Washington State.

Or rather, lack of "charter schools," https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/06/charter-school-law-funded-by-bill-gates-in-washington-state-ruled-unconstitutional/

Charter schools in Washington state have been ruled not eligible to receive public funds, essentially since they are not public schools. I'll admit to being mostly disappointed with the Charter School movement myself. For me, much of my worry is the underlying assumption that the REAL problem with public schools is that they are just not using their money correctly, that is, if you give the same funds to someone else, then they can just crunch the numbers and do better. Well, first of all, walk into a public school room in Philadelphia with too many students, an inexperienced teacher and crumbling walls and tell them that they have enough. See how that goes. Also, though, I think the justices in this case have hit upon the issue of accountability that goes very deep with charter schools. There isn't the public oversight of a school board or other truly public safeguards, so we risk money going to things like 6 to 7 figure incomes for Charter CEO's or managers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/local/dc-charter-school-executive-salaries/1606/

If nothing else, I'm hopeful this leads to a change in culture such that the public expects more of a role in the management, of and decisions to renew or not, charter schools. 

 

What Abilities are Tested on an IQ Test?

What Abilities are Tested on an IQ Test?

Different tests will emphasize different kinds of tasks but there has by now been enough research to identify distinct abilities. Most of this comes in the form of a kind of statistical research called "Factor Analysis." Psychologist look at the performance of large groups of people and see which kinds of tasks are related, that is, when people do well on one task, what else do they do well on, and when they do poorly, what else do they do poorly on? When they see which ones are closely related and what the tasks have in common, then it allows for a picture of what the distinct abilities are. Further research can show what each ability is related to in terms of academic achievement.

Primary Abilities

It is mostly my own distinction between what is a "Primary" ability as opposed to a "Secondary." I'm not aware of another person in psychology who has decided to distinguish categories this way, but I'm also not just making them up. For one thing, every ability has a certain amount of what we call "g Loading." The letter "g" in this case means "general intelligence" and different abilities appear to account for different amounts of g. The ones I consider Primary Abilities predict a lot of someone's IQ (they have high g loading). They also account for a lot of achievement. Finally, they tend to be closely related to each other. In fact a lot of cognitive psychology suggests they build on each other. The more of one you have, the more of the others you tend to develop. I'll explain a little more about that as we go.

Primary Ability 1, Fluid Reasoning: This is probably what most people mean when they say "Intelligence." This is the ability to solve puzzles, find patterns and figure out how things work and connect. Classic tests include matrix tasks where the student views a series of pictures and has to figure out the pattern or rule that determines what should happen next. Other tasks may have a student look at a set of figures and determine the relationships between them. Usually, these tests do not have explicitly verbal components.

In real life, we use fluid reasoning all the time. Any puzzle or problem that may make you say "OK, if when we do this, then this happens.. then I'll bet if I do THAT, then THAT will happen," is an example of fluid reasoning. Sometimes, this is related to critical thinking skills as well.

Primary Ability 2, Long-Term Memory: This is your ability to learn new things and remember what you've learned. This is a little harder to test since the kind of learning we do in real life is harder to simulate in a test and takes place over days and many repetitions. In testing, the student may learn a code, learn the names of people or things or else readily recall things that the test maker can be pretty sure the student knows.

Again, this is an ability that is used often. Especially in early schooling, we learn new words all the time and although a lot of them are sounded out, a lot of them are just learned by sight. "Island" and "right" are words that can't be sounded out, so they are learned and repeated in the same way as on Cognitive Tests.   

Primary Ability 3, Fund of Knowledge: This is how much you already know. There is reasonable disagreement on whether this should be tested on IQ tests at all. Several psychologists have pointed out that relying too much on measuring Knowledge will result in low scores for students who have been through poor schooling or a home with few resources since these students will not have had the opportunity to build their knowledge. Considering that most people's idea of IQ is that it's fully or mostly intrinsic, this can make a student from a difficult background look like he or she is just not bright. Some major tests actually avoid this all together (like the CAS) while others have ways to factor it out if needed (like the KABC-II, or the WISC-V).

The problem with excluding knowledge from testing, is that it's really important. When you encounter a problem, you are more likely to be able to solve it if you have seen problems like it before. If you want to remember something, you can do so better if you can connect it to something you already know. Think for example how much easier it will be to learn the history of the revolutionary war if you already know what a "general" is, you already know about military strategy and you know the major events that led up to it. If you're reading a story, you'll understand it better if you know all of the vocabulary it uses and maybe something about the period when it was written (imagine reading Shakespeare without knowing why he keeps writing about kings). That's why Fund of Knowledge predicts a lot of achievement and why if a student has a weakness in it, I want to know it to plan on how to help. On the other hand, if a student shows a low fund of Knowledge, but is strong in the other primary abilities, then I tend to conclude that they have not had the opportunity to develop their Knowledge.  

How do the primary abilities fit together?

The better your memory and learning, the bigger your fund of knowledge gets. The more you know, the easier it is to build on that knowledge to solve problems. If you remember what you figure out, then you it helps build your knowledge.

So far, there's nothing all that surprising here. While I'll get later on to whether you can specifically improve your IQ, I would say that if all you take away from this blog is that it's good to make sure you (or your child) learns a lot and gets lots of practice in solving problems, then that's great. The Secondary Abilities are maybe a bit more interesting, but they are generally not as important. They are less related to achievement, and less related to your overall score, so when a student is weak in one of them, it is more likely point to a learning disability, ADHD or other factor as opposed to a really weak IQ.

Secondary Abilities

Secondary Ability 1, Visual Spatial Reasoning: This refers to the ability make an accurate visual representation in your mind or to make sense of a visual field. People with good visual processing may be able to picture a map or a shape in their minds with great accuracy. It's that focus on whether your imagined picture is correct that makes this ability distinct from just imagining something. A child can have a good imagination and picture that he or she is flying in space, but to show that they have good visual processing, they need to be able to visualize a consistent space ship and plot its path through a map of stars we draw of them. On tests, Visual Spatial reasoning tasks might require you to assemble puzzles, plan a path through a maze, or accurately picture what an object looks like from a different angle.

There is some evidence that being particularly weak in this area can lead to poor math performance, but for the most part, it looks like as long you are at least average at this, it doesn't affect your achievement that much.

Secondary Ability 2, Auditory Processing: This is the ability to accurately analyze and understand auditory information (including speech). It's related to reading and sometimes listening comprehension. Those with poor Auditory Processing may have difficulty combining letter sounds to sound out words as they are read. It's tested with tasks that ask the student to listen to recordings of words that are hard to understand due to distortion or background noise. Other tests may require the student to distinguish among similar sounds. 

Secondary Ability 3, Processing Speed: This is the ability to complete simple tasks quickly and accurately.  In my experience, this is the Ability with the least helpful name. In popular use, "processing" has come to mean something like "thinking." Parents often say "he takes a while to process what I say," and then I have to explain that when they see a section of my report marked "Processing Speed" it has nothing to do with this. Rather, tests in this area require quick matching of symbols or numbers, or quickly solving simple puzzles. This is closely related to tasks like reading fluency or solving simple arithmetic where most adults and older children can work automatically. Performance on these tasks can also be affected by attention since if the student is at all distracted, they will solve fewer puzzles.    

Secondary Ability 4, Short-Term Memory: Short-Term Memory is distinct from long term memory in that information is only in short term memory briefly. When you have to remember that you are in the store to buy bread, you're using your Short-Term Memory. When you first learned that bread is made from wheat, that went into your Long-Term Memory. Low scores can drag down other areas since most complex tasks are helped by being able to keep things in awareness. Short-Term Memory is also important in early reading and for mental math.

Short-Term Memory is another ability that can be impacted by difficulty in attention. Attention difficulties can mean that you miss some information before it enters Short-Term Memory, or you might become distracted while you have to keep it in awareness. Tests might be relatively simple such as having a student remember a string of letters or numbers. More complex tasks may start the same way, with a string of letters or numbers read to the student, but then the student will have to do something else. After answering other questions or otherwise being distracted, then the examiner will check whether the student still remembers the list.  

Secondary Ability 5, Quantitative Reasoning: This refers to reasoning with numbers. Some tests consider this a sub ability of Fluid Reasoning, while others (such as the Stanford-Binet V) treat it as its own ability. Tests require a student to solve puzzles that require some form of counting or comparing quantities.

Quantitative Reasoning is obviously related to math ability, but becomes very hard to test in older students since it's difficult to separate from math achievement. To see whether a young child has developed the concepts of quantity, bigger or smaller, or number patterns, is easy to test with puzzles or pictures. On the other hand, if a test must challenge an older student, then the harder Quantitative Reasoning task it employs will need to be either a word problem or pictorially presented math problem. No matter how far the test moves from a straightforward math computation problem, there will be a kind of math (algebra, geometry, etc) that can be used to solve the test. This gives a very large advantage to students who have taken these classes and moves it farther away from an IQ test and into being an achievement test.

National Center for Learning Disabilities: Student Voices

The National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) has just released a very interesting data set. The group spoke to about 1,200 young adults with difficulties in learning and attention and explored their perspectives on their experiences in school. Some of the findings are not particularly surprising such as the decreased chance of these students to graduate, but there were other findings that really stuck with me. 

The report pointed out a lot of the social difficulties these children face. I feel like it's sometimes ignored by parents and educators, but there is a whole host of social struggles that can stem from being a student who struggles. Honestly, this can come from any difference (I've seen students get picked on for their weight, their glasses, their curly hair and a host of other much dumber things) but it may be a much bigger problem for students who also struggle with learning. If they're disconnected from peers, they may not want to show up to class, or they may just become attached to whatever group will take them (even if it's one we'd much rather they avoided). I think it's good to see this spelled out and see the impact it can have on students. As always, it reminds me of the need to be compassionate and think about every aspect of a child's life, not just the area directly impacted by a disability or difficulty. 

Check out the full report here. 

What about online "IQ Tests?"

There are two things to get out of the way: the first is that there are entirely too many online "IQ Tests" to possibly discuss them all and the second is that even if a website claims that their test is different and just as valid as one that would be administered by a Psychologist, it's very, and I mean VERY difficult to believe that it could be.

Most of what makes an IQ test valid is the normative sample. During development of a test, the publisher administers the test to a large sample of people to get an idea of how we would expect anyone to do (what’s a good score? what’s a bad score?). Your score on a real IQ test reflects a comparison to hundreds or thousands of your peers. They are also selected carefully so that they come from different places, have different levels of educational attainment and otherwise represent the country as a whole. No online IQ test I emailed (and I emailed five) responded with information about how the normative sample for their test was developed. I suppose it is possible that one of these companies went far and wide and invested millions of dollars in developing a sample, but it would make more sense for them to just assign scores based on whatever standard they make up rather than to spend a lot of money on something most people won’t even know they need.

It is also possible that a site could be using people who seek out the tests as a comparison group, but this is also not going to create an adequate sample. If a real test's sample can be accurately described as "a representative sample of the entire country," then the sample for an online "IQ test" will be more like "people who felt like taking an IQ test and have an internet connection and happened to click on that test." Not everyone has an internet connection, and we don't know who would decide to take the test. I would be reasonably sure that it's not students who may be eligible for special education, or the majority of people who are average and have no particular need or desire to know their IQ. Even if an online test had enough people to make a normative sample, then they wouldn’t have the right people to do so. Then again, as I looked at these, I started to realize that there’s no reason for them to do so.

Every online test I took gave me an initial score and then offered me the option of a detailed report for a price. I am inclined to think that the average person would be more willing to spend money at a site that tells them what they want to hear, and who doesn't want to hear that they are a genius? A few dollars for the details of my own genius sounds like a good deal. In other cases there might be motivation for a site to give an artificially low score. Several sites also offered games or other services that claimed to boost your IQ, so why not sneak in a claim that some area could use a little work? This is a big difference from my own practice or the practice of other School Psychologists or Psychologists. We don't make more or less money depending on the score, but we can be sued if our score proves inaccurate. Our biggest incentive is just to provide an accurate score. Setting aside all of the speculation about intentions and how a website might try to make money this way, there is also one inescapable fact: all of the tests I saw were pretty bad.     

IQtest.com gives a test of 38 True or False questions from which 13 sub scores are derived. On the WISC-V, (the most common IQ test for children) 5 sub scores come from 10 tests on which an average student will respond to between 4 and thirty questions. These are given in a dynamic manner where the student answers as many or as few questions as they can manage. This means that whereas on a real test, the student goes through a range of questions on each subtest, with at least two subtests combined to make a score in a given area, the IQtest.com test creates sub scores from two or three questions. I could literally click wrong and vastly alter my score. Other sites offer similarly limited numbers of questions, with the most impressive number being Queendom.com's test with 57 questions.

It's possible that there is, or will be a website with the motivation and capability to make a valid IQ test to be taken online, but it does not seem likely. A big enough normative sample to create valid scores would require a huge investment, and accurate scores would overwhelmingly be in the Average range, which is not what people probably want to hear, (right at the top of the page, IQtest.com reminds you that you are "Smarter than you think"). There is also no reason to make a set of tests, with lots of questions that have been heavily researched when a few dozen questions pulled from nowhere look official enough. If anyone cares to take one, I wouldn't stop them (it was fun reading ten different times that I am a genius), but I'd warn them not to take it seriously.

If you have a questions of your own, and especially if you are in Pennsylvania where I am certified to practice, then feel free to get in touch: Greg@DrGregPhD.com

"Concussion"

Hot on the heels of my post about Russel Wilson peddling potions, I have another piece of concussion related news. Will Smith, one of the patron saints of American movies, will be starring in the upcoming "Concussion," a film that purports to show the discovery of Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) by Pathologist Bennet Omalu and the consequent resistance from the NFL as Dr. Omalu worked to expose the dangers of repeated head trauma (though only actually seeing the movie will show us how accurate it is). 

Dr. Omalu deserves the praise the movie will give him and his work has lead to settlements for former players and (I hope) better protections for current ones, but I want to take just a minute and touch on one character who may or may not make it into the movie: Mike Webster. As an Eagles fan (sorry, I grew up near Philadelphia) I actually hadn't heard of "Iron Mike" until his death. I vaguely remembered thinking how sad it was that a great NFL player died so young (he was 50) and a few of the other details such as his homelessness and estrangement from his wife, but didn't think much of it. Webster was evidently the first or one of the first people Dr. Omalu discovered with CTE (although more soon followed). Profiles of Webster point to troubling but common issues with attention and concentration. It's also very possible he suffered the depression identified by other players (perhaps contributing to his later difficulties with other people). The saddest thing may be that his reputation for staying on the field even when hurt and his exceptionally long career both cemented his reputation and made sure that he would play through pain or confusion. He was doing his job and doing what made him one of the most admired men in the top sport in the country and he died broke and desperate. A longer account is available from ESPN here.

Webster reminds me in many ways of a lot of people I knew who have gone far in football. I can imagine that he was so good at the game and so praised by his team mates that he tied much of his identify to being a great football player. Part of that is play through the pain. A decades long career in football will obviously do more damage than playing in high school, but I hope athletes (not just in football, but hockey, rugby and cheer leading) will look at a case like Iron Mike and really think about what it means to play through the pain. I hope their coaches do too.   

How is an IQ Test Scored?

At one point, IQ was calculated based on the mental age/ chronological age, * 100. There are a few issues with this practice but the one that has stuck with me the most is that the concept of "mental age" is misleading. If an adult is intellectually disabled, and has an IQ of 60, he still has very little in common with a 7-year-old. He's probably got many weak areas in his reasoning ability and memory but, he'll have a personality and experiences that are very distinct. Thinking of him as a little kid's mind in a man's body doesn't make sense.

Now, IQ is calculated by way of comparing someone's performance with others their own age. It's more meaningful to say "you did better than 90% of your peers" than to say to a 7-year-old "you performed as if you were 15" (trust me, it's totally different chatting with a smart little kid than talking to an average teen).

Here's how scores are calculated. I'll use a real test as an example in case you want to look into it a little more. The most popular test for kids is The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC-V). When a kid takes one of the subtests like Block Design, (on which they assemble multicolored blocks to match a picture) I record the number of questions they got right. This is called their "raw score." This doesn't tell us much. A 6-year-old matched the blocks five times... is that good? Also if he gets five questions right on that test, but then eight right on a different one, does that mean he's better at that other test, or is that just what you'd expect him to get anyway?

The most important part of test development (and one that you can be sure online "IQ" tests don't do) is to give the test to thousands of people from around the country. This gives us "Norms" to compare performance to. Maybe most kids at the age of six get five questions right on Block Design. The variation in their scores is also calculated, so that if most get five questions, but a lot also get one or two more, then the extra one or two are not considered a big deal and won't pump up their score very much, whereas if it's rare to get an extra one or two right, then the kids who do will see their score go up a lot. The score created this way is called a "Scaled Score," because it is calculated to give an impression of how the child did in comparison to peers. Since Scaled Scores are always expressed as having a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 3, it can allow us to compare different tests. If our hypothetical kid did get five questions right and so did most other kids his age, his scaled score would be a 10. If his score is a 13 on a different test, then we can confidently say he did significantly better, and a 7 would show us he did significantly worse.

The next step is to add certain scaled scores together to form a "Composite." Closely correlated subtests are grouped together so we can get an impression of the student's performance in a given area. For example, Block Design is grouped with visual puzzles, and both tests require problem solving based on pictures and not words. We'd add the Scaled Scores for both together, and the total is converted again to a "Standard Score." These are like Scaled Scores, but they have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. They also give a better impression of how a student performed than just averaging scores since they account for how common or uncommon it would be to get a certain set of Scaled Scores. If a student gets some variation but he's mostly average, then he'll get a Scaled Score close to 100. On the other hand, if he gets all significantly higher than average scores (maybe all 13s), then his Standard Score will be higher than one Standard Deviation above average (even though all of his scaled scores were one standard deviation above the mean). This is a little tricky to explain, so stick with me.

Students don't usually get any 13s (it is a significantly above average performance after all), and even fewer will get three of them, so instead of a 115, it might be a 120 or a 125 since this total is just that far above average. These are also more reliable than the scores for any single subtest, so we consider them a bigger deal. The IQ, is actually a Composite of all of the subtests on an IQ test. Put aside all of the complicated math, and what an IQ score says is "Compared to lots of other people the same age, how do you do at a wide variety of tasks?"