About the speaker: With over 40 years experience Veronica has been undertaking private assessments since 1996 and during this time has advised around 2,000 families. From 1998-2001 she was the Consultant Psychologist at Fairley House School (catering for pupils with Specific Learning Difficulties). Between 1988 and 1996 Veronica worked as an Educational Psychologist for two of London's Local Education Authorities. Before becoming an Educational Psychologist, Veronica taught in both mainstream and special schools. The latter catered for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties and pupils with serious physical disabilities.
Further information about this Talk
For more information about Veronica Bidwell and her practice please click here.
Key Points Covered In This Talk:
- The reliablity of IQ tests and what they test: IQ Tests do not test inspiration, motivation, social ability. There is so much about a person that is not being tested. However, the WISC (Weschler Intelligence Scales for Children) can be extremely valuable. It is good predictor of how children ought to do in assessment. It is a valuable and reliable test but one needs to be careful how to interpret it. If a child does well you cannot possibly say that it was a fluke. Although the test is very reliable - individual's test scores come up very similar over extended periods of time - children who are at a very low ebb because they are not doing well at school can not do so well. Once such children's esteem improves they can get a higher score.
- The IQ Test format: There are ten tests that Veronica Bidwell uses: three on verbal, three on perceptual reasoning, two on working memory, and two on processing speed. You put all the scores together to get an overall IQ. Sometimes if the performance is very diverse it is better to focus on how a child has done in the four different domains.
- Verbal Tests:
- Similarities: Children are asked how things are similar (e.g. red and green are colours; apples and bananas are fruit). It gets more difficult as the test progresses and the questions get quite challenging (e.g. revenge and forgiveness). This test shows how quick children are to make connections.
- Comprehension: Children have to give longer definitions. Example questions include "why is it important for police to wear uniform?" ranging to "why is freedom of speech important in a democracy?" These are not things that children are likely to have been taught but is information that they have picked up from the world around them.
- Vocabulary: Children are asked to give word definitions. Language is not important as long as the definition is correct. Children who do not read very much often have lower vocabularies.
- Non-Verbal Tests (Perceptual)
- Block design: The children are given some red and white cubes so that they have two sides of red, two sides of white, and two sides of half red and half white. The children have to match these cubes to some 2D patterns. Children who have difficulty with block design very often have difficulty with maths. Maths is spacial and a lot of maths is to do with repetition and patterning. For children who struggle with this kind of thing, Mosely blocks can be used to help connect language with spacial things.
- Picture concepts: Quite often the child who cannot do block design can do a non-verbal task when it is just to do with pictures. Children initially see two rows of pictures and they have to pick one picture from the top line to match it with one picture from the bottom line. The links between the pictures get more and more obscure. It increases to three lines and the pictures have a linking concept (e.g. on the top a hose pipe, in the middle a kitchen sink, and on the bottom line a kettle with steam coming out of it which would all be to do with water).
- Matrices: Again this is about completing a pattern and seeing how well they can problem solve and deduce. Often the child who is bad on block design and good on picture concepts will be somewhere in the middle with matrices because it's partly pictures and partly designs and shapes.
- Working memory: Children who have difficulties in the classroom so often have difficulties in working memory. Working memory is a bit like the mental white board. It is what you can remember in the very short term. Therefore if a child has a poor working memory they are going to forget what they have just heard quicker than a child with a good working memory. They find lists of instructions difficult to follow. The average working memory for an adult is seven (give or take two). Children's working memory develops as they get older. If you are distracted or overloaded you can't remember anything. Children with poor working memory need careful management in the classroom. They should be seated in a position where they can ask if they haven't taken something in. If you are teaching you should say things in bite sizes and make sure that sentence construction is very simple.
- Numbers as a measure of working memory: Reading out numbers and getting children to repeat them measures working memory. During the test there will be an increasing number of numbers and then the child will be asked to repeat them in reverse order. Sometimes the children who can manage the digits forwards find doing them backwards very difficult. Although they can hear and take in a number sequence, as soon as they have to hold something in their mind while manipulating it or working on it they struggle. For example, while doing mental arithmetic you have to hold onto several facts before you do the sum.
- Arithmetic: This is the other part of the working memory test. Maths problems are read in word form. Even children who are good at maths but don't have a good working memory can struggle as they cannot hold the information.
- Processing speed: This involves a pencil and paper test.
- On the first test they have the numbers 1-9 written on a line at the top and underneath there are certain shapes, so each number has a shape attached to it. The child then has two minutes to fill in the boxes below with some lines and numbers. If the child has difficulty looking up and focusing when your transferring information down, if the child's hand-eye coordination is poor or if the child has poor concentration they won't do very well. It is the assessors job to try and work out which of those three things is the problem.
- The second test is called symbol search which is similar. This involves looking across the page to identify whether a symbol on the left is being repeated on the other side of the page.
- The IQ results: The important thing is the interpretation of the IQ score. What tends to happen is if someone has no particular strengths or weaknesses they would get a very even profile - all their scores would be similar. Results come in the form of a scaled score which shows how a child has done relative to his or her peer group. The scores go from 1-19. The average child would score 10 on each one and get 100 overall.
- Dyslexic's IQ Score: A mild dyslexic's IQ scores would have quite good verbal scores except the vocabulary might be a little bit down if their peer group have been reading for while. The non-verbal and processing speed should be fine but the working memory score will be down. The dyslexic will therefore have a problem with working memory and the problems with word finding and rote learning of information.
- Dyspraxic's IQ Score: The child who is dyspraxic is likely to have problems with the block design and the coding. They might do very well on the verbal and on the non-verbal (except for block design) and have a perfectly good working memory but might have difficulty with decoding.
- The verbal test and perceptual reasoning are more to do with pure intellect in terms of how quick a person is. The working memory and processing speed are how you process incoming information. When you get children who are high on thinking but their information processing is low you know they can't demonstrate what they understand in the classroom. They don't take things in easily and if they are slow on the hand-eye tests they are often the children with poor handwriting as well. They may not be dyspraxic but they can't get things down. Such children don't have the information processing skills that they need within a work situation.
- The key thing is deciding what to do next if there are problems, whether it's looking into a speech and language therapist, an occupational therapist, going to a special school, or just a bit of fine tuning.