School-Age Children

Ages 6 - 18

Blue Cat offers gifted, psychoeducational, and neuropsychological testing for school-age children, adjusted to individual needs.

What this means is that we look at the reason for referral (such as when the visit is requested by a medical or psychotherapeutic practitioner) and the child's and parents' descriptions of the difficulties before selecting unique tests for our evaluation.

Gifted Testing

Gifted testing is a limited form of assessment. The school, district, or state defines the criteria and makes the ultimate determination of giftedness.

The evaluator estimates the child's full-scale intelligence quotient (FSIQ, or IQ for short) with a given range of confidence. The evaluation usually consists of a short interview and approximately 90 minutes of IQ testing. Sometimes, academic achievement testing is also tested. Typically, gifted status is determined (by the school) using several criteria other than just FSIQ.

The expected range for gifted IQ is usually a score falling in the top 2.5 percentile of the test norms. Scores for an individual are likely to differ between different IQ tests and at different testing times.

Importantly, giftedness is a fluid concept – test results may change over time. A child may be gifted in specific areas that are not examined in standardized testing.

Download Florida Gifted PDF

Jens Maus (http://jens-maus.de/), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

For more about IQ, visit:

https://dictionary.apa.org/iq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient

For more about gifted testing, see:

https://nagc.org/ https://www.fldoe.org/academics/standards/gifted.stml

Neuropsychological Evaluation

A neuropsychological evaluation is a more in-depth look at many functions of the brain (neurocognitive domains) to get an idea of how a child compares to their peers.

Neurocognitive domains refer to abilities in:

learning
memory
language
visuospatial tasks
processing speed
attention
concentration
executive functioning
emotion
social skills

Psychoeducational Assessment

A psychoeducational evaluation is an attempt to quantify a child's academic skills by comparing their achievement on school subject-area tests to a measure of their intellectual capacity (an estimate of their FSIQ).

If there is a marked weakness in one or more subject areas (e.g., writing, spelling, reading, math) as compared to intellectual ability, it may indicate a specific learning disorder (SLD). These are sometimes called dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia.

Findings of SLDs usually support the implementation of an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) for the child's educational process to support and possibly remediate this isolated weakness.

Diagnosis and taking action in the classroom is very important for SLDs. 90% of students diagnosed with an SLD go on to graduate. Visit the National Center for Learning Disabilities for additional information (https://www.ncld.org/).

Some specific reasons you may bring your child to a neuropsychologist:

Let's say that you and your child's teachers believe that your child may be gifted.

The school will typically offer to perform free testing. If your child meets the criteria, they may then be placed in an exceptional education program (an enriched learning environment for at least part of the school week).

However, some parents may wish to have an independent opinion, may not be willing to wait for the school system to arrange testing, or may desire more certainty that the testing is performed by a highly qualified professional. They may therefore come to us for gifted testing.

For more information on Florida's requirements for gifted testing, visit https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/5660/urlt/standardsfaq.pdf.

Now, if your child is gifted, but rather unexpectedly, also has great difficulty in math class, you may want to further explore academic function in depth with a psychoeducational evaluation.

This assessment may be performed by the school system for free, but we do find that a significant number of parents prefer to have their child privately tested by a specially trained neuropsychologist.

However, if the same child also experiences difficulty maintaining focus, staying in their seat, and organizing their work, both at home and in school, there is a possibility of an attentional issue. In this case, the parents may wish to pursue a neuropsychological evaluation.

This assessment would target the question of giftedness (an IQ test) and attentional function (e.g., ADHD testing). During the full evaluation, we comprehensively evaluate many areas of brain function in addition to IQ and attention. This helps to rule out alternative causes of inattention, such as poor sleep, mood, anxiety, etc.

A note about testing children & adolescents

Because each child is different, the tests administered, the conditions of testing, and the times of testing (both time of day and duration) vary greatly. As a result, there is no standard test battery, time frame, or cost associated with testing.

We will customize every administration for the child at hand in order to obtain the most accurate results possible.

Brain Activity Book for Kids

Why use Blue Cat instead of free school testing?

We usually recommend that you accept the school's offer to test. Testing alone does not require you to commit to anything. Additionally, your school's psychologist may be very experienced and qualified.
However, we can test and provide a report in as little as one week.
Children attending home school or private schools may have reduced access to public school testing.
We are Doctors of Neuropsychology. All testing at Blue Cat is directly performed by a neuropsychologist, who is a licensed Clinical Psychologist with a doctoral degree and extensive fellowship specialized training. The school system is not held to the same standards (although many licensed School Psychologists are indeed highly skilled and qualified).
Although school testing and the Individualized Education Plan (IEP) process are designed to optimize the gifted child's function in school, parents may desire more extensive and holistic recommendations to support the child's future learning.
Many children have multiple "exceptions" – for instance, gifted intellectual skills comorbid (or co-existing) with ADHD, autism, or specific learning disorders that are better examined with a full neuropsychological evaluation. At Blue Cat, these tests would be discussed and added to the evaluation on the same day and administered by a specialist in these areas. This may not be possible with school testing.
We have an extensive array of tests available in order to choose the most appropriate measure given real-time information gathered during the interview and assessment. For example, our instruments available for the assessment of IQ alone include:
- - Differential Scales of Ability – Second Edition (DAS-II)
  - Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test – Second Edition (K-BIT-2)
  - Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test – Second Edition (NNAT2)
  - Leiter International Performance Scale – Third Edition (Leiter-3)
  - Woodcock-Johnson Test of Cognitive Abilities – Fourth Edition (WCJ-COG-IV)
  - Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales – Fifth Edition (SB-5)
  - Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV)
  - Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children – Fifth Edition (WISC-V)
  - Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI)
  - Raven's Progressive Coloured Matrices (RPCM)
  - Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scale (RIAS)

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