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I wanted to bring this up front for a couple of reasons:

• first, most people (I find) aren't aware that a normal IQ does not show a large gap between 'Verbal' and 'nonverbal' or 'Performance.' I'm still hazy on the distinction between verbal and performance myself, but if you think of it as verbal & spatial you're on solid ground, I think.
  
  This is important to understand, because we're accustomed to thinking talents are separate & opposed; if you're good at 'A' you're bad at 'B.' I have no idea how this idea plays out later in life (I'm guessing it starts to be significantly true in high school.) But, certainly, a normal child's IQ scores on Verbal and Performance will be close. When the scores are not close, that's often a problem - and it's a hallmark of autism, which is the only reason I know about it. (Autism isn't the only cause of a large gap between verbal and performance.)

• IQ scores, Susan says, predict classroom success quite well

fyi: I used the word 'scatter' in the title of this post, which also comes from autism. Autistic kids will show 'scatter,' or 'islands of ability.' It can be incredibly strange. Donna Williams once wrote that her scores on the various subscales of IQ tests ranged all the way from mental retardation to genius.

That's scatter.


Here's Susan:

Bright children with ADD can get through grade school fairly easily. It's down the road that the problems of attention and/or hyperactivity start to become a serious problem.

I don't know the percentage of states that do this, but in IL some kind of an IQ test is done by third grade. (Here, I believe they did the Otis-Lennin one, which usually corresponds prettly close to the standard WISC III (or whatever WISC they're on.) When the parents are meeting with everyone at the end of 3rd grade/beginning of 4th, they may or may not know that the teachers and administrators have a clear view of what some intelligence test showed on their child. They often won't explain its meaning unless specifically asked for by the parent.

I mention this because in the case of ADD, an IQ score is usually going to be an underestimate of the child's true ability. At the very least, children with ADD or LDs often have wider spreads in their numbers than other children.

In other words, in most IQ type tests the numbers should cluster together. When there is a spread, or when it is below what parents or teachers think it should be, it indicates a possible problem.

Remember that IQ is not an actual measure of intelligence. There is no true measure of that. What it really does is tell you how well a child will do in a standard American classroom setting, and in that regard it is quite reliable. So, the outer edges of the bell curve are really just "falling out of the curriculum" by up to 2 years or more.

So, I'll give you an example of a kid I know who showed ADHD symptoms and had been frustrated quite a bit during his early grade school career. The kid takes the required Otis-Lennin in the third grade and bombs, showing a very low score. The parents are shocked because the kid reads years ahead of his classmates. They demand another test, so they give him the latest WISC (III or IV) and he comes out with a Performance IQ of 146, yet a Verbal of 106, with the overall IQ being around 130. Up to this point, teachers had been treating him as a disorganized, but above-average kid, nothing special. But what they realized they had was a kid with a superior intellect who had a deficiency. While a verbal score of 108 is still considered "above average," the fact that it was in such contrast to the other score told his teachers that he was in need of a completely different approach. They quietly provided the parents with an IEP and made him a part of the gifted program.

So, intelligence testing can often be a useful tool to a parent when dealing with schools. Although, I still don't think many of them really understand ADD, either, or its impact.

-- CatherineJohnson - 27 Sep 2005

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