11 Plus Exams Forum

Just something I've been thinking.

A number of the Verbal Reasoning questions require a reasonably extensive vocabulary (well for a 10 year old and even I've had problems).

By Vocabulary questions I mean those where you have to find words of different or opposite meaning, and also missing word questions.

To me Verbal reasoning should be more a test of Deductive skills and logic, not vocabulary. Vocabulary in my oppinion should really come under an English test

You may then argue that shouldn;t number sequences be maths, but for them you only require very basic maths and its more about being able to spot patterns.

Anyway this is all purly accademic, I was just wondering if maybe I'm looking at verbal reasoning in the wrong way.



Steve

I agree with you totally.

My eleven year old son is dyslexic and did not really start to enjoy reading until about a year ago. Due to this his vocabulary is very limited. When doing Nfer VR tests he had absolutely not problem with the questions that tested deductive skills and logic but always floundered on the questions that did not involve logic but just a knowledge of word meanings.

Luckily I am very proud to say that he still passed his 11+ with very good marks.

I agree. I ague the same about certain questions in IQ tests. My husband always does better than me in the vocabulary type 'IQ' questions. If you don't know the words you can't prove your IQ.