Jessica, don't put too much belief in the school's assessment. Aspies & autistics are notoriously difficult to assess. Also, if you can get hold of the school's assessment results in detail, look for the sub-score results. These are your true guideline. I have talked to many psychologiss plpus read the "rules" online that they are supposed to follow in administering those tests, and I can assure you that the NSW schools here in Australia (and from what I hear, many schools in the US) commit the cardinal sin of averaging out the sub-scores to give you a final IQ score. Now, this is what you are supposed to do as a rule, but ONLY if there is not too wide a gap between the highest score and the lowest.
An example from difficult child 1's assessment - he scored 17 in Verbal Communication, and 6 in Coding. There were other scores in between but generally showing similar gapes. Most of his scores were in the 12-14 range, trending towards 14. About three or four were below 10. Such a score spread should not have been averaged out, but his School Counsellor did just that, then presented us with "He's got an IQ of 105, so you don't need to be pushing us so hard to support him in his high skill areas - he's not as bright as you thought. Don't worry; most parents make the same mistake, it's common for parents to want their child to be the best, the brightest, etc."
Very patronising.
difficult child 1 was about 15 when he was given this test. When he was 6, he was given his first IQ test by his (then) school counsellor. difficult child 1 at the time was undiagnosed and unmedicated, I couldn't get any idea of exactly how to get help for him especially with a GP who insisted there was nothing wrong. I knew there was something. Meanwhile the school were angry with me because I wanted them to accelerate easy child, who was extremely bored and stagnating academically. So when difficult child 1 began to present as a problem (new teacher, very rigid, after a previously instinctively accommodating teacher the year before) they grabbed the chance to "show me up" as a neglectful parent. The school counsellor ran a fairly basic psychometric assessment on difficult child 1 (without my knowledge or permission - the teacher was sending notes home in difficult child 1's bag, they were papier mache before I got them, I had no idea, teacher failed to ring me or grab me at the classroom steps) and because difficult child 1 was anxious (and unmedicated ADHD as well as the Asperger's that went undiagnosed for another 8 years) the kid was increasingly fidgetty and non-compliant. She stopped the testing prematurely, then scored it as if he had done the whole thing. She said she couldn't continue testing while he couldn't stay in his seat and pay attention. I found her manner confronting and I was an adult - poor difficult child 1 must have been scared stiff, he had no idea why he'd been hauled out of class and was being interrogated by this woman. He was only 6 years old! So of course he scored badly. I have no copy of his scores because the policy was (while difficult child 1 was at school) to not give out subscore results to mere parents. I was able to get his later scores, the ones I quoted, by getting difficult child 1's then psychiatrist to ask for full copies. He then gave me a copy. But I was shown the results and sub-scores, which was enough to tell me that the school counsellors got it badly wrong.
The point it - when he was 6, we were told that difficult child 1 was "retarded". Yep, that's what she said. She went into more detail - "Your son is actually performing much better in class than his test scores indicate he is capable of. It is obvious that the only way he could be performing like this, and undoubtedly why he is so anxious - YOU are pushing him to achieve, in your zeal to drive your kids to impossible lengths." She went on to use difficult child 1's scores to berate me about my previous request to accelerate easy child (years later it turned out she should have been accelerated after all).
On the one hand I was a pushy parent driving my children to achieve above and beyond (this is actually impossible). And on the other hand, I was putting all my eggs into the easy child basket and neglecting difficult child 1. It was ridiculous.
Meanwhile at the other end of the desk, quietly drawing pictures on the paper and with the pencils shoved at her by the school counsellor to keep the kid quiet, was a 3 year old easy child 2/difficult child 2. I still have the picture she drew that day, complete with her attempt to write her own name on it. She drew a multi-coloured monster with pupils in the eyes, whorls in the ears, horns, full solid body with fingers and fingernails, toes and toenails, smiling mouth with a tongue and lots of teeth. Monster drawn dead centre in the page, name written in the top right corner. At three years old. And they had seen tis kid get no help from anyone, not even me looking over and encouraging from a distance.
In the face of the attack, I just pointed to her and said, "Look at what she has just drawn. Did oyu see me push her? Did you see me encourage her or interfere with her activity in any way? No. THAT is what is pushing difficult child 1. She does his shoes up for him. She puts his sandals on for him. She helps dress him. He is getting dressed with help from his baby sister. You ask what is driving difficult child 1 to do better than he technically should be capable of (which is in itself an absurd statement). Well, he has one sister ahead of him setting a very high benchmark, and another one coming up behind him. I am not pushing him. But I Am concerned about him and nobody has been willing to help me get to the bottom of it. I don't believe you are right about his intelligence, but I do agree there are problems. So how about you work WITH me, and stop hurting AT me? The child is important here, not any point scoring."
To her credit, the school counsellor did help us by putting me in touch with a pediatrician who specialised in learning problems. That bloke gave us at least a partial diagnosis. But he left a lot of stuff out because he himself was one sick puppy. The school counsellor wouldn't have known that, however.
difficult child 1 never really got the help at school he should have had. We had to fight hard to get even the little we got. The delay in diagnosing was a big factor. So he came out of the school system at age 20, having taken a few years longer to graduate, but at least with his HSC (Aussie equivalent of high school/college matriculation).
easy child 2/difficult child 2 initially appeared to be a child genius like her older sister. We did get her assessed independently, at age 4. She scored with an IQ of 140 approx. At the same time, we had easy child & difficult child 1 assessed. They also scored high. He noted (and I observed) that difficult child 1 was difficult to assess because he didn't really understand the importance of the testing, he also had developed an avoidance pattern when faced with topics he found challenging - it was how he learned to cope with his high level of anxiety. But he still scored as having an IQ of 130. We were told that when sub-scores reach numbers like 16 or 17, they are generally under-estimates and are skewing the actual intelligence measure downwards. It's like a ball being thrown up to a certain height - if you can measure the height the ball reaches, that is the score. But when the ball is throw up indoors, it hits the ceiling and you can't therefore get an idea of how high the ball would have gone, if the ceiling were not in the way.
Another point I want to emphasise about IQ tests - they were initially developed and applied to "normal" kids in schools. Kids selected en masse and recruited via schools, to be tested and whose results in these newly developing tests were used to set some sort of benchmark against which normal capability could be scaled. They are an artificial measure, but they are all we have. They are constantly being revised. But if you test a non-standard subject, you will get some really weird and often meaningless (and sub-standard) results. At the very least, you should not draw serious inferences in broad of the individual's intelligence. Rather, you look at the sub-scores and determine where the subject needs some remedial help, and where they may perhaps enjoy some further stimulation.
Let's say you are a family recently arrived in your country, from a non-English-speaking background. You start your child at the local school and because your child is young, they are more able to learn the language. If your country of origin has a different alphabet (say, the family is Arabic, or Russian, or Chinese) then the child has a steep learning curve indeed. Maybe the child did well back home. But here, it's going to be a struggle.
A teacher expresses concern to the school counsellor. School counsellor comes in and does a basic psychometric assessment. This involves asking the child questions verbally, in English. There will be a delay in responses as the child double-translates back and forth mentally. A lot of the tests are timed. The child may have picked up the rudiments of English quite quickly, but still seem slower than if he were asked to function in his native tongue.
Other tests are done. One test involves showing the child some cards which are a scrambled set of pictures. The child is asked to put the pictures in sequence to tell a story. They are fairly obviously connected, you see the same characters in each picture and the sequence of events. Maybe a table is being overturned and a vase of flowers on the table falls and breaks. Clearly, in the frames showing broken vase, they come after the frame showing the table and vase intact.
What if the child's country of origin and written language of origin reads from right to left, instead of from left to right? In some countries, comic books are drawn from left to right - my kids collect manga, much of which is drawn from right to left. But a school counsellor may not pick up on this and downgrade the child's score, if the pictures are in complete reverse order.
I'm not saying your child grew up in a foreign country with a different writing system. But I am saying that applying these tests to a non-standard child will not give you accurate results. You need to find other measures to assess your child's true ability.
Another common measure is achievement in school. Again, Aspies can be at a serious disadvantage. They can be absolutely brilliant in one area, but impossible to test because they can't stay on task for long, or they're highly distractible. When difficult child 3 was attending the local mainstream school we were putting so much in place to help him stay on task - he had an aide. He had a special desk to work at which was away from everyone else and which faced into the corner of the wall, so there wasn't even a window to distract. He had headphones playing classical music (no lyrics allowed either, or he would sing along). He was really hard work and the teacher earned her pay that year. She actually said to me, "I know he's more capable than his test results show." He simply couldn't cope with exam pressure, he had eventually to do them in a separate quiet room and the slightest distraction (including building work several blocks away) would completely put him off his stride.
difficult child 3 now, does his schoolwork at home. We post it in to the school. Sometimes he visits the school for a one-to-one lesson, or small classroom lesson with maybe six other kids. He's still highly distractible but at home he is more able to control his learning environment. He will take twice as long to get his work done for a subject, but get almost full marks for it. His teachers still say he could do better, but understand why he can't. They simply say, "We know he's bright. Very bright. But we also see he's almost impossible to assess."
They are trying to develop testing methods which can give a more accurate measure in autism and Asperger's. difficult child 3 was part of a research study about 5 years ago, trying to develop such a test. It's been interesting to see how his IQ scores have changed over the years. This shouldn't happen - your IQ score should, if testing is accurate, always be much the same. You shouldn't be able to learn, to do better in an IQ test. In difficult child 3's case, he was first assessed at age 4. He "failed" his first IQ test, in my opinion because he was still mostly non-verbal. His receptive language was way below what it should have been, his expressive language was mostly echolalia. ANd they asked him the questions verbally, and expected some sort of answer? Crazy. On the basis of those results, they told me that difficult child 3 would never be able to attend a normal school, would always be extremely dependent, would basically never be able to function without constant supervision. It was pretty much "plan to put him in an institution" type of talk.
I knew they were wrong - tis was a kid who could read (the words he could speak and knew the meaning of, were the same words he could read), was doing some maths problems already, had been playing the piano and using a computer since before his first birthday.
Later on the school counsellor assessed difficult child 1 as having an IQ of 110. Again, there were huge gaps in the subscores (his test score looked a lot like difficult child 1's at 15). Interestingly, difficult child 3 had recently been assessed as part of the research study I mentioned, the one trying to develop an IQ test to use for more accurate results, hopefully, in autistics. They had scored difficult child 3 as having an IQ of 135. I had given the school counsellor copies of those tests, they had only been done a few months earlier so she should not have re-assessed him. it is wrong to keep testing kids too often because they learn how to do IQ tests and you can get artificial highs over time. If she had asked my permission to test him (instead of yet again going ahead without my knowledge or consent) I would have warned her off it for just those reasons.
There is now way difficult child 3's actual intelligence could vary so much, especially not in such a short time.
It all points to the fallibility of IQ testing.
However, getting your child tested is important. But only for the information it can give you. Use that information wisely, do not consider the results set in cement, but work on the low skill areas and support and stimulate the child's areas of expertise.
Temple Grandin has a very weird obsession - cattle loading chutes. How on earth could that ever be useful in the real world? Well, she has found a way to make it work for her, and it brings in a great deal of her income. She has also used it to lead her into an academic career in animal behaviour.
When she was very young, her parents were told she would be better in an institution. But they worked with her, hired people to work with her, found things that worked for her and kept going. This must have been so difficult - it was still in the days when autistics were considered to be aloof, to be unemotional, to be lost causes and to be the result of the "cold mother". There are still idiots out there who will treat the parents like dirt, because they have an autistic child "therefore it's YOUR fault".
Temple Grandin herself says she feels autism (and in association, Asperger's) is "an overdose of genius." The child has, in large measure, what in small measure would be called genius. Often there are high IQs in other close family members. From the kids we know (including some who are profoundly autistic and barely verbal) I would say this holds true.
What is intelligence? It's hard to define. How do we measure it? Not easily.
if you consider intelligence to be the ability to adapt to your environment and be able to use it, then again, how do you measure it? Often we develop our own informal measures by merely observing the people around us and how they interact with their world. It's very subjective. The old concept of "idiot savant" was a way of trying to explain away the apparent high skill in a narrow area, coupled with apparent inability in many other areas. Not long ago it was still considered to be a 'fake' skill, like a parrot learning to mimic the sounds of its owner. Calendar calculators were thought to be using a trick memory, for example. But prodigious memory is one thing measured in IQ tests.
What it boils down to, I think - people in general, especially those testing intelligence, do not like to feel inferior to someone they can see is not functioning at all levels. Therefore they need to find a way of rationalising away the sometimes stratospheric splinter skills of the savant, by reducing their 'value' by declaring those skills to be fake, or pseudo-skills, a magic trick.
In my opinion, there is nothing fake about them. In autism, in savants - there is simply a part of the brain kicked into high gear. Sometimes it's the lack of energy being expended in other (more apparently productive) areas of the brain. There are researchers working on how to kick in that creative, savant part of the brain. Work is continuing. It's fascinating. The more they learn, the better we can understand how the brains of our children work.
Never underestimate your child's capability. Always treat your child as if he or she is the most wonderful, intelligent, perfect creature on earth. That may not actually be true, but it greatly increases your chance of it becoming true.
A child who is taught to believe in himself/herself is a child who has been given a great gift. But they also need self-determination - you don't convince your gawky, awkward and dyspraxic child that all she has to do is work hard and she can win Olympic gold at the gymnastics. No, let the child find where she wants to focus.
Marg
It is needed, as you well know!!!!
Also, your kids and my son are quite high functioning. Some kids need outside help from people who have been trained specifically for this disorder. JM .02 
