The Best Test Prep for Your 7-Year-Old©

by Deborah L. Ruf, PhD, 2022

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.

In a later post, I talk about how to find the right person to work with you and your child for individual testing.

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, so it’s time-consuming for the school psychologist or gifted specialist.

Well-known individual tests have more questions within a wider array of ability domains than the group tests have. The latter 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 usual cutoff age, though, schools almost always require testing. It’s the most common reason to test earlier than age 7.