Education psychologist understanding iq results

Five complementary subtests yield three complementary composite scores to measure related cognitive abilities.

The WISC is used not only as an intelligence test, but as a clinical tool. Some practitioners use the WISC as part of an assessment to diagnose attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities, for example.

However, the research does not show this to be an effective way to diagnose ADHD or learning disabilities.[2] The vast majority of children with ADHD do not display certain subtests substantially below others, and many children who display such patterns do not have ADHD. Other patterns for children with learning disabilities show a similar lack of usefulness of the WISC as a diagnostic tool.[3] Although, when Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory is used to interpret the WISC–V subtests, things tend to make a great deal more sense.

When diagnosing children, best practice suggests that a multi-test battery, i.e., multi-factored evaluation, should be used as learning problems, attention, and emotional difficulties can have similar symptoms, co-occur, or reciprocally influence each other. For example, children with learning difficulties can become emotionally distraught and thus have concentration difficulties, begin to exhibit behavior problems, or both. Children with ADHD may show learning difficulties because of their attentional problems or also have learning disorder or disability (or have nothing else). In short, while diagnosis of any childhood or adult difficulty should never be made based on IQ alone (or interview, physician examination, parent report, other test etc. for that matter) the cognitive ability test can help rule out, in conjunction with other tests and sources of information, other explanations for problems, uncover co-morbid problems, and be a rich source of information when properly analyzed and care is taken to avoid relying simply on the single summary IQ score (Sattler, Dumont, & Coalson, 2016).