Gifted & 2E Assessment

* Rough Transcript *

Hello. So today I would like to talk about getting an assessment as a gifted or twice exceptional adult. And this post has been a really long time in coming. I’ve been thinking about this post for probably months because over the years, first assessing students and more recently assessing adults, there have been a lot of themes that have come up and various people have talked to me about their own personal experiences and I thought it would be really helpful to kind of share some of my thoughts about things that you should think about when you’re going to pursue an assessment and the fact that all assessments have various aspects that are really potentially useful and informational and also there’s limitations for each one and All assessments have their strengths and limitations.

So I thought it would be helpful to kind of go through an overview of different types of assessments and what kind of information you might find and some things to consider if you’re going to pursue that type of assessment. So before I get started, there’s a couple of things that are generally universal about getting an assessment as adults.

First of all, if you think you’re gifted, you’re probably Gifted people have imposter syndrome quite often, and you are much more likely to actually be gifted and doubt that you are than to think you might be gifted and not really be. Statistically speaking, you probably are gifted if you think so. And on the podcast Unleash Monday with with Paula Prober, Nadia, the host asked her, how often do people come to you who think they’re gifted and are not?

And she said, none. And that’s essentially the experience that I’ve had as well. If someone thinks they’re gifted, they’re probably gifted and they might not. Can I score a certain number on a certain test? But every test has its limitations. So it might not be quite catching what it is that makes that person gifted.

That’s something important to understand about all assessments. And if you are going to get any kind of assessment, you really, really want to make sure that the person who’s doing the evaluation has familiarity with giftedness and twice exceptionality because a lot of people who don’t are going to look at scores and they might look at, things that aren’t that low and just dismiss them because they’re within normal limits, but they don’t necessarily notice the patterns that might show up with someone who’s gifted and the big spikes that might show up if they’re twice exceptional.

And so it’s really important to make sure that whoever it is that you’re evaluating has a lot of experience with giftedness and if you suspect twice exceptionality, that they understand a lot of the basic Neurodivergencies that might intersect. So as I mentioned, every type of evaluation is going to have its limitations and it’s going to have its strengths.

And every evaluator is going to have their biases. They just are. We all have biases. And so the important thing to really understand when you are talking with someone who is potentially going to do an evaluation, to really Ask them about what they see as the limitations of the assessment tools that they use and their own biases, because it’s really helpful to understand where their perspective is coming from and what tools they use so that they can understand the potential Strengths and challenges of whatever it is that they use and their own biases.

So those are just something that is universal. No matter what assessments that you’re doing, there are things to consider. So I’m going to talk about four different types of assessment and kind of a combination of all of them. And those types of assessment are diagnostic evaluations, specifically just to get a diagnosis.

Psychometric evaluations, which are standardized one on one assessments done with a trained professional, qualitative assessments, self assessments, and multi modal assessments, which combine a variety of those modes. So first of all, diagnostic assessment or evaluations, obviously a diagnostic assessment has to be with someone who is trained and skilled.

has whatever certifications or professional credentials that they need to make a diagnosis. And so for things like ADHD, autism, those sort of things. It’s usually someone who is either a psychologist or a medical professional. Some counselors can diagnose certain mental health conditions as well, but the really important thing beyond what their credential is, is what their experiences, specifically in giftedness and in other areas that you might suspect neurodivergency.

So if your primary purpose in a diagnostic evaluation is just to get the diagnosis for either treatment or accommodations, and you’re not really that concerned about the insights that they might have or really detailed. evaluation, then you can go to a doctor or someone who is qualified to prescribe or diagnose, but you want to make sure that they at the very minimum understand enough to say that you can’t be.

Too smart to have ADHD, or you can’t be too social, or have too good eye contact to have autism. Those are things that you want to make sure that if you’re working with. A mental health professional or a doctor and they’re making these diagnoses that they don’t have these false notions that people who achieve at a certain level or present at a certain level can’t have these diagnoses and that they are looking really at the inner workings and what’s going on inside and not just looking at the outside.

So the person that gave me my diagnosis was a psychologist through my insurance and they weren’t particularly. specialized in giftedness, but they definitely acknowledged that you could be both gifted and ADHD and so getting the diagnosis wasn’t a problem. But I have heard many people who have had experiences where they were blown off because they achieved too high or they were too social and that sort of thing.

So it’s definitely something to keep in mind. If you are looking for an assessment, be sure to ask them what tools that they use and make sure they’re not just basing diagnosis off of one measure, one tool, that they’re looking at it from a variety of perspectives because one particular measure might not quite capture what it is that you’re experiencing.

If you are, suspecting a specific diagnosis and looking for an evaluation for that. Be sure that the person that you’re working with is familiar enough with other possible overlapping conditions or comorbid conditions because Oftentimes, if they specialize in one, just one area, they might overlook signs of other things.

For example, someone who specializes strictly in ADHD might miss certain signs that might indicate potential autism as well. And they don’t necessarily have to be able to diagnose that, but they should at least be able to see enough signs to recommend someone else who can make that diagnosis. One of the ways they might do this is using comprehensive screeners that look at a variety of things and not just the one diagnosis that you’re looking for.

And that brings us to psychometric evaluations, and oftentimes diagnostic evaluations use psychometric evaluations as part of the assessment, but not always. They, they usually at least use some sort of standardized screener, questionnaire, that sort of thing. They don’t always do one on one assessment to look at things like cognitive ability or academic achievement or in person executive functioning skills in the moment.

But the psychometric testing that is done oftentimes by Either neuropsychologists or other people who are trained to administer those assessments can really give a lot of valuable information about our strengths and our challenges and what areas we might be extremely high on and what areas we might be extremely low on.

So, psychometric evaluations can be useful in that they are always performed the exact same way and they have certain standardization to compare them to how other people your age would perform on those tests. So it can kind of give you an idea of how you compare to others and also how you compare it to yourself.

But there are also limitations because there’s a variety of factors that can affect our performance and you can have a false low. But not a false high, unless there’s some major test administration error. So if you score high on a standardized assessment, that is valid. And if you’re surprised by a certain score, it’s worth looking into, you know, what it is that is your strength.

Because those are things that really you can’t score high on accidentally. But because there’s a variety of things that can get in the way of our performance, things like how we’re feeling in that moment, anxiety, sleep, eating, even rapport with the evaluator can affect how we perform on those assessments.

And so you want to make sure that the evaluator is taking those things into consideration. For example, somebody shared once. about their experience with an evaluator who didn’t take into account that they had some visual issues that were interfering with their performance on the test and they were actually having a procedure done to their eyes coming up.

And the evaluator did even acknowledged that as a factor and that obviously is going to affect the scores of all of the visual tests. So really a good evaluator wouldn’t even Yet, until those things were resolved. Or if those things weren’t going to be resolved or they were permanent, then they would factor that into the final assessment.

Once again, it is extremely important that anyone who does an assessment with a DDSS Someone who’s gifted or twice exceptional really understands giftedness and twice exceptionality because if they don’t they may miss some signs of some processing issues that are going on or they might not really catch the significance of having some scores that are really really high And other scores that are maybe not low, but either average, maybe even high average, I’ve seen discrepancies that are actually very superior to superior and there’s still a gap, but it’s not as significant as if it was in the, you know, average range or below average.

And so a lot of times I’ve seen people who have had experiences with Psychometric evaluation who are told, Oh, you’re doing fine. You’re you have well developed. skills in this area, even though that area was five standard deviations below their highest area. And that one standard deviation would be notable to unquestionably significant.

You get to five and that is huge. And so for someone not to acknowledge that even though it’s average, it’s that much lower than their highest scores. That is concerning. And so if you’ve had evaluations in the past where you had huge highs and huge lows or you know, relative lows and they blew you off.

I also have done consultation looking over people’s past evaluation so I can help find their strengths and challenges. I myself was one of those people who was blown off in my testing in college because I scored mostly well above average. But I had a few average scores and those were mostly an auditory processing and working memory, which was related to my executive functioning deficit.

But no one really knew what ADHD was at the time, especially in girls. So they just kind of blew it off and even asked me, why did you even take this test? And That experience was so invalidating because obviously I was struggling or I wouldn’t have taken the test and I had a 50 point gap between my highest and my lowest scores, even the clusters.

So it’s something that I’ve seen a lot of people dismiss or they’ll say, Oh, you can’t have ADHD because you’re working memory and processing speed isn’t. low enough. And some of them actually did have a relative discrepancy. So their, their working memory processing speed was relatively much lower than all of their other scores.

And that’s significant, but also not everyone with ADHD scores low on those tests. Statistically, yes, they tend to more often score low on those, but sometimes, especially with twice exceptional folks, they actually take those tests as a fun challenge and kind of hyper focus on it and do really, really well.

And so just because you don’t score low on working memory and processing speed. doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re not ADHD, because that’s one specific test. And if you’re highly motivated in that moment, you could actually show skills that maybe in an environment where you don’t feel that challenge, it wouldn’t look that way.

So it’s really important that the person understand that and not blow those off because you don’t always score a certain way just because you have a certain diagnosis, especially with ADHD. Because ADHD is really about an inconsistency in how we can respond and we have a difficult time regulating. And so sometimes we might do really well, other times not so much.

The problem is we can’t always control what it is that we hyperfocus on. Also keep in mind that if you do have extreme highs and lows on your assessment, that those lows are going to bring down the overall score. So, for example, if you do score low on working memory and processing speed, then the evaluator should share cluster scores or other scores that reflect your areas of strength.

as well. And so, for example, on the WISC, there’s another score called the GAI that gives a score where they take away working memory and processing speed because those are often the most frequently affected by learning disabilities, ADHD, and other neurodivergents. And so when we take those out, you can get a feel for their general reasoning, verbal ability, all of those things.

And so if you took the WISC, And you have those as lower areas, they should definitely be sharing the GAI. And it’s funny because I’ve actually gotten evaluation reports where that was the case and they didn’t show the GAI. And it’s kind of bizarre to me that professionals wouldn’t do that because even parents in gifted and twice exceptional groups now know enough to encourage people to ask for the GAI.

So the fact that there are professionals that aren’t giving it when there is an overall score lowered because of working memory and processing speed. That is an issue, and it is actually something that can be calculated after the fact if you have all of the original subtest scores. When you’re going in for a one on one standardized type assessment, be sure that you think about what kind of emotional or physical factors might Okay.

at things that are going to affect you during the test and be sure to communicate those with the evaluator. So try to time it at a good time of day for you and consider any physical issues like you might need to get up and move a lot, that sort of thing. You really want to kind of be at your optimal performance when you do that.

And you want to make sure that the evaluator is looking at things. test scores. And so looking at how you approach the task, how you think and learn, because there are things on tests that can’t be quantified. For example, you may give. Extremely detailed answers to the verbal ability test, and you can only have a one or two point answer.

And so beyond that, you could be much more in detail, much more comprehensive in your answer, and it’s not really gonna be reflected in the number because you can only have a one or a two. And then the final thing that I really like to give a heads up on for. People who are choosing to get an assessment as an adult is that on standardized assessments, your score as an adult may come out actually a little bit lower than you would expect, a little bit lower than you might have when you were younger for a variety of statistical reasons.

And so it’s something to keep in mind that just because you didn’t score quite as high as you might have expected on a certain test. It could be that if you had taken that test when you were younger, you might have actually scored higher. So for example, my score went down quite a bit on two different tests, but it did go down.

And for me, part of that was because my executive functioning skills, the expectation for my age was much higher as an adult than it was when I was younger. And also because when you’re younger, there’s a huge. And then the last two types of assessment kind of overlap. They are qualitative assessment and then self assessment tools, which often qualitative assessments may use some of those self assessment tools as well.

So qualitative assessment. can really be anything that looks beyond just the numbers. And so it can involve things like observations, interview, questions, reviewing old records, reviewing portfolios and information. Sometimes they use that for identification of gifted kids in programs and really kind of looks at, at you as the expert.

And gathers information and kind of looks at patterns based on whatever their method is. And so qualitative assessments can be formalized. They can be through a specific process, or they can be more based on observations over the years and looking at patterns and that sort of thing. So qualitative assessment is, can encompass almost anything that doesn’t involve just what’s the number, how do you compare to other people.

So qualitative assessments can give really useful information that can’t be quantified on a standardized test, but they’re also limited by whatever model and experience of the person who’s doing the assessment or what model of giftedness they use or whatever their methodology G is for the assessment.

And so every methodology, every approach is going to have its strengths and challenges. Just like any type of assessment, so it’s really useful to know what tools what models of giftedness They look at and all of that stuff and what their previous experiences with doing this type of assessment Because that’s going to really help you to understand what type of information you might gain from doing that assessment Keep in mind that a qualitative assessment is obviously going to be limited by the amount of time involved, the number of questions, the type of questions, and so getting a comprehensive picture is going to be limited by the tools they use and the time that it is involved.

In the end, keep in mind that you are the expert on yourself. And so if something comes up in evaluation that doesn’t feel quite right, that doesn’t feel quite fitting for you, you are ultimately the expert of yourself and you are allowed to take what is valuable to you and use that information and Disregard parts that don’t really fit and don’t feel like it makes sense to you.

Because in the end, especially when it comes to, well, all assessment with, with standardized assessment, you’re going to be looking at perhaps the numbers don’t reflect what you think you’re really capable of. And maybe there was something that got in the way or these lows brought down the overall score.

And with qualitative assessment, you’re going to be looking at the fact that There’s only so many factors that you can consider and so they might not be looking at the specific factors that are the most important to you. And so it really just depends on the approach and the experience of the person and so you may gain some extremely valid and useful information.

But also people are people and qualitative Is going to give us the information that that particular approach was designed to give us. For example, if I personally were to take a test that involved, say, writing a certain amount of words, like I had to write a really long response, it’s probably not going to reflect my full capability because I tend to be a very concise person in a lot of my writing.

Although, this post that I’m writing now was not. Short or concise. So it really just depends on the questions and the area how detail I might go into, but I’m likely to lack detail in my response because I don’t tend to write a whole lot. I tend to kind of want to keep it short and to the point. But I have a history of standardized assessment that can help tell me where it is that I, that I fall.

And so I’m able to look at information with that knowledge, but not everyone has that knowledge. And so if you think you’re quite high in something, then that’s quite likely. And if you’re not, if that’s not being reflected, that’s something you can look at. Maybe there was something getting in the way.

And then finally, the last type of assessment that I was going to talk about is self assessments. So there are a ton of self assessments that you can do that will give you more information. Some are gifted specific, some are not, and I am planning to write a more in depth post specifically about self assessment tools because I think they can be super useful and there’s a ton of really good resources out there that you can do.

But in the meantime, there’s a few that you can check out. One is there’s a gifted adult checklist at the Gifted Development Center that you can find on their website. And that’s really super useful. And also Paula Probert on her website, Your Rainforest Mind, she also has a giftedness checklist, which can be super handy if you look up Your Rainforest Mind quiz.

And If you’re looking at more neurodivergent specific things, there is a questionnaire called the Cognitive Processing Inventory on a website called ldinfo. com, and I use that one in my assessments of students to look at what their processing strengths and weaknesses are. And I warn you, the website’s super old, and so it’s really clunky, but the tool itself can be really useful in making recommendations based on your strengths and challenges.

There’s also some great books that might help explore your giftedness or neurodivergence such as Your Rainforest Mind book by Paula Prober, The Gifted Adult. If you’re looking more neurodivergent specific, I know there’s a lot of great books on autism and ADHD out there that I’ll go into in a little more detail later.

There’s the Dyslexic Advantage is great for looking at the strengths of dyslexic thinking, which is really cool. And also there’s one called the power of different that looks at a variety of neurodivergences and looks at both their strengths and their challenges. So those are some great books that might help kind of give you personal self assessment based on.

reading these chapters or books and seeing where you’re reflected and where you’re not. Of course, the challenge with self assessment is that there can be a lot of information to take in and sometimes it can be hard to know what to do with that information. So if you need support with that, there are Coaches, I myself can help with that.

And some people who kind of understand now, let’s take that information and make some recommendations. And so on that note, the final thing that I was going to share was looking at a multimodal approach to assessment. And that is looking at. using a variety of these tools all together. And most comprehensive assessments are going to be multi modal.

They’re going to use a variety of tools in, in doing their assessment. And so if you’re doing a full neuropsych eval, probably going to be using a variety of those modes. And when I do an assessment in school, a comprehensive educational assessment with students that uses a variety of those things as well.

And so when I was looking at what I can do for adults, while I can’t personally diagnose. with adults or kids for that matter. I can identify learning disabilities in school, but I really wanted to use some of the tools that I’d been using with students that I thought gave me the most information about how they think and learn.

And then I looked into some standardized screeners that can be done with adults. remotely through zoom and so they can be done. They don’t have to be done locally, which is really cool. And they give you enough information to kind of get a feel for your strengths and challenges, but it’s not a full blown.

in depth educational or psycho educational evaluation. It’s more of a screener with a lot of self assessment aspects and qualitative aspects that can help look at your strengths and your challenges and really come up with strategies that can help use your strengths in a positive way and really understand your challenges.

So if you’re interested in learning more about The assessment process that I do, you can find more information on my website, AuroraRemember. com under adult assessment. And feel free to reach out to me on my contact page. You can send me a message and we can set up like a half hour to just talk about the process and see if it would be a good fit for you.

Because the more that I’ve been doing, the more I’ve found, it’s really been generating some useful information and strategies to help with self understanding and working with our strengths. And as we wrap this up, I do want to mention that we have a very exciting group call this week, the third Saturday of September on over excitability with Chris Wells, who is the director of qualitative research at the Gifted Development Center.

So I’m super excited to hear from her and you can come join us and find more information on our website and you can also join us in the community where you can access the library of all our past calls at community. embracingintensity. org. Dot com. Have a great.