Is any familar with the Raven Progessive Matrices IQ test?

[Stacy in NJ]

Ds 10 yo had his annual physical today with our ped. At prior annual appointments we had discussed the fact that C had had a difficult time learning to read. I brought him up to date with C's progress, which has been, thankfully, excellent. The doc seemed to think that C was a pretty bright kid and suggested we have him take an IQ test. He suggested the Raven - why this test I wasn't clear on - I'd never heard of it.

 

Can anyone offer some general information on this test? I googled but really couldn't figure out why it would be more attractive then the standard - is it Whesler (sp) test.? I really should call the doc back, but I'm a bit embarassed.:blink:

 

Thanks, Stacy

[elizabeth]

 

http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices Do not use the Wechsler the ceilings are too low and they are not designed to capture giftedness. Ravens are ok but the old stanford binet is the gold standard by those who work in the field . Look at the info at the Belin Blank center online and see if there is more information there. Also try http://www.hoagiesgifted.comhope this is helpful. I would have lost my mind without Hoagies gifted to steer me through the hogwash I was mired in by dd's former school. Still angry? You betcha. Eternally grateful for SWB and her book to bring me out of the muck? Absolutely. Best of luck and if your little man is learning and happy leave well enough alone the numbers are just not that helpful. It still takes a bit of trial and error to find the right amount of challenge.

[Capt_Uhura]

I read somewhere today that the Ravens is supposed to pick up non-verbal, visual-spatial kids. So, given you said your son had some reading issues, perhaps that is why the pedi recommended that particular test. The WISCIV is strong in the verbal area where as the SBV is stronger in the reasoning/math area. that's about all I know.

 

hth

[KAR120C]

I think what I would do is find a psychologist (educational psychologist? that's what we used...) and ask him or her. The pediatrician may know about tests, but the psychologist almost certainly will. There are pros and cons to any test, and some will be designed to pick out certain things, so if you have any particular concerns that would probably change what test you end up with.

 

Before we tested DS I had a nice long telephone conversation with the psychologist about what we wanted to know, what we were concerned about and what "quirks" were troubling us. There were several ways we could have gone with testing but after that conversation the psychologist recommended the Wechsler (WISC), an achievement test (Woodcock Johnson) and a test of visual-motor integration. Those three together got right to what we needed to know, and the psychologist said afterwards that the other test he had considered (I don't remember now which one it was) would have completely missed some of the important bits that we were happy to have discovered.... So the crux of it is, I think each situation may be different enough that any one person's recommendation, while perfect for their situation, might not fit your child... and part of the job of the professional psychologist is to know what tools s/he has to find what needs to be found. It's not just a matter of a single IQ number, but of all the various strengths and weaknesses that each test can tease out.

 

Clear as mud? LOL

[Stacy in NJ]

At this point I'm not sure that any testing is in order. It was just a curious conversation, I guess. I don't have any particular concerns about ds. He's your basic 10 yo boy, somewhat bright, but I doubt heavenly Einstein is concerned about being replaced. Thanks for the info, though. If at some point, if we do do some testing, we'll consult a psy.

[Stacy in NJ]

That makes sense. Thanks.

[KAR120C]

At this point I'm not sure that any testing is in order. It was just a curious conversation, I guess. I don't have any particular concerns about ds. He's your basic 10 yo boy, somewhat bright, but I doubt heavenly Einstein is concerned about being replaced. Thanks for the info, though. If at some point, if we do do some testing, we'll consult a psy.

Then it really would be "just a number" if you kwim? In our case we were concerned about some quirks that we thought might be signs of some real problems, and we were concerned about some areas he had difficulty. The quirks, it turned out, were just quirks, but the difficulties showed up in a huge (HUGE) discrepancy between subtest scores. He's great at some things and just not at others, and when you ask him to combine them you get some weird issues.

 

So the most useful aspect of testing for us was figuring out what all that was about. It was fun to know how high his high scores were, and useful in giving me the confidence to know that I wasn't imagining things. (LOL) But what was really important was where he scored low, because that told us more about what we have to work with.

[jazzdiva]

Ds 10 yo had his annual physical today with our ped. At prior annual appointments we had discussed the fact that C had had a difficult time learning to read. I brought him up to date with C's progress, which has been, thankfully, excellent. The doc seemed to think that C was a pretty bright kid and suggested we have him take an IQ test. He suggested the Raven - why this test I wasn't clear on - I'd never heard of it.

 

Can anyone offer some general information on this test? I googled but really couldn't figure out why it would be more attractive then the standard - is it Whesler (sp) test.? I really should call the doc back, but I'm a bit embarassed.:blink:

 

Thanks, Stacy

I took the Ravens test as a teenager testing her mettle against Mensa people. It was the most culturally unbiased IQ test I had ever taken, a far cry from the very wordy Otis-Lennon. The whole test was non-verbal and consisted of matrices whose pattern you had to recognize and predict. There's no "practicing" for this test. It's either your son gets it or he doesn't. But I must tell your son not to believe the "progressive" description, i.e. that it's supposed to go from easy to most difficult. I believed the proctor, and a couple of minutes before the end of the test I took a peek at the last item, and it wasn't difficult at all!

 

But enough about me. If your objective in having your son tested is to determine only his intelligence quotient, then I suppose Ravens will suffice. If you want to see aptitude and ability in various skill subsets, you might want to try Wechsler, which is composed of both IQ and achievement testing. Good luck! :D

[saw]

when he was 6, last year. He is a visual-spatial learner with speech/language difficulties. He scored only slightly above average on the Ravens, and we learned nothing about how he learns. A few months later he took the WISCIV and had a much much higher score. I don't know how much of the difference was due to the type of test and how much to the tester, but the experience didn't leave me with a good impression of the Ravens.

Of course this is only our experience, which was probably influenced by many variables, but since there isn't much out there on the Ravens that I could find, I thought this bit of subjective information might be helpful, especially given that ds is the type of child for whom the Ravens is meant to be useful.

[Ailaena]

when he was 6, last year. He is a visual-spatial learner with speech/language difficulties. He scored only slightly above average on the Ravens, and we learned nothing about how he learns. A few months later he took the WISCIV and had a much much higher score. I don't know how much of the difference was due to the type of test and how much to the tester, but the experience didn't leave me with a good impression of the Ravens.

Of course this is only our experience, which was probably influenced by many variables, but since there isn't much out there on the Ravens that I could find, I thought this bit of subjective information might be helpful, especially given that ds is the type of child for whom the Ravens is meant to be useful.

 

 

 

This was almost EXACTLY our experience with this test. I was trying to get dd into a school for "highly gifted/high acheivers" in 1st grade and they gave this test to Kindy kids along with the 2nd grade IOWAs. She was barely above average on the Raven's test, but 95+%ile on the IOWA and they recommended that she take a "standard" IQ test. About 6 months later, I had her sit for the WISC-IV and her overall score was ridiculously higher, she ceilinged the verbal part.

 

I honestly think her troubles with the Ravens and the quantitative part of the WISC may have been because she was just not yet able to reason as well as she could have, since she was struggling with language learning. But what do I know? Its all moot point now! But she is still really horrible with mentally manipulating images (like the put-together-the-dice stuff and the paper holes, etc).