Assessment of Children Who Are Gifted with the WISC-IV

Publisher Summary

The greater weighting of the Verbal Comprehension and Perceptual Reasoning Factors into the Full Scale score benefits the students with strengths in the higher level cognitive areas. In addition, the separation of speed-based tasks into a separate factor allows students who have strengths in the higher level cognitive demands of the verbal comprehension and perceptual reasoning tasks to demonstrate their skills with time to reflect. Verbal Comprehension has remained very similar to the WISC-III factor of the same name. For the gifted population, the skills required in the Verbal Comprehension factor are traditionally the strongest indicators of giftedness and this was found to be true with the standardization sample. Perceptual Reasoning has changed significantly from the old Perceptual Organization factor. It includes two new core reasoning subtests: Matrix Reasoning and Picture Concepts, in addition to Block Design. All of these subtests were found to discriminate between the gifted and control standardization samples. Although all the factors have undergone some degree of change, the only new factor is the Working Memory Factor. Before looking at the standardization sample, we hypothesized that Working Memory would be a better discriminating factor than Processing Speed for gifted students. Although both Processing Speed and Working Memory did discriminate between the gifted and control samples, in both of these factors there were component tasks for which there were no differences between the two groups.