If You Have a Reason to Assess a Young Child for Giftedness …

Here are some good reasons and how to go about it.

In this post, we look at how to prepare your bright, possibly gifted child for individual or group testing for intellectual ability and current achievement levels.

The reasons a young child gets tested for academic ability and intelligence vary.

Some parents recognize or suspect their children are so highly intelligent that they would benefit from starting school earlier than other students. It’s called Early Entrance and is common throughout the country. Although schools sometimes administer the needed tests free of charge, it isn’t common. An individual test is time consuming and requires a higher level of training than for a group test to administer, and it also requires interpretation and report writing time for the school psychologist or gifted specialist. Also, at some schools you may or may not get a report that explains the results.

Well-known individual tests have more questions within a wider array of ability domains than the group tests have. The latter — group tests — are proctored by classroom teachers and aren’t as thorough as an individual test but are great for initial screening purposes. Before children are admitted to school earlier than the…