Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional New Here! Please Help with WISC Scores and DOE

Hello,

I've been checking out all of the Davidson forums and after reading some topics here, I'm wondering if my daughter is 2E. I've been suspecting Sensory Processing Disorder for about a year and started trying to get an evaluation with the DOE last winter. This summer, we have been going through evaluations with the DOE and the Child Mind Institute and have our first meeting with the DOE this Friday. We have received results from her WISC-V and Woodcock Johnson IV Tests, administered by the district, and the discrepancies between them are confusing to me.

Basically, the psychologist reports that she's "extremely intelligent" but the WJ-IV test results are mostly average. They are saying that there are no discernible LDs but if her achievement scores don't align with her intellectual abilities, it seems something is getting in the way, no? Perhaps the sensory integration issues? On the WISC-V, her Coding and VSI seem low in comparison to her other scores. I'd greatly appreciate any help interpreting these. I'm so new to this and I'd like to attend the DOE meeting with a deeper understanding and armed with the right questions and the ability to advocate for my daughter.

WISC-V

Verbal Comprehension: 37 (Composite Score 150)
Visual Spatial (Block Design): 13
Similarities: 18
Matrix Reasoning: 14
Fluid Reasoning: 31 (Composite Score 131)
Digit Span: 17
Coding 11
Vocabulary: 19
Figure Weights: 17
Full Scale 139

WJ-IV

Reading: 100
Mathematics: 116
Letter Word Identification: 110
Applied Problems: 129
Passage Comprehension: 91
Calculation: 102

Since I've been suspecting SPD, I requested that she also be evaluated by an OT. Their report recommends two sessions per week. The OT told me at the end of the evaluation in July that she'd work up a "sensory diet" of activities for my daughter to do daily. I'm hoping to hear about that at Friday's meeting and start that process as well.

Overall, we've been seeing a gradual decline in performance as the demands of formal schooling have ramped up. The more she has to sit still and do worksheets, the less she functions. In nursery and pre-K she was always developmentally ahead and she seems to be working at grade level most of the time now, even in subjects where I know she is definitely able to do higher level work. When I started questioning that 18 months ago in kindergarten, I was told the teacher didn't really have time to address it. So we tried to work ahead at home to keep her interested and challenged. When I questioned it last year in 1st grade, especially in math, I was told she doesn't work fast enough to merit doing 2nd and 3rd grade math at school even though she does it at home. Seeing these results, maybe the processing speed has something to do with that? She has started to show anxiety around math, reading, and timed tests which breaks my heart.

Thank you for any help or advice you may be able to give me. I have loved reading through past postings and have tried to glean wisdom and courage from all of your experiences. I'm so grateful that I've found this community!

Welcome!

The assessments you report do appear to be consistent with a learner with very high potential in verbal reasoning, strong fluid reasoning, slightly lower but still good visual spatial skills, and low efficiency. There is a fair amount of diversity in her achievement scores, with her math reasoning and basic word calling skills falling at levels generally commensurate with highest estimates of her ability, but reading comprehension and math calculations well below personal expectations. If the OT came up with recommendations for intervention, that would obviously be the first place to start, but I would consider also looking into other profiles that have difficulty with "sitting still and doing worksheets", such as ADHD.

While processing speed/timed tasks are clearly a personal area of vulnerability, there are other outlier scores that are not associated with timing. Block Design and Coding are timed (and, yes, among her lower scores--though BD isn't far off Matrix Reasoning, so I wouldn't consider it truly low in comparison with her other scores. Also, it's in the High Average range, bordering on Very High.). But other personal weaknesses aren't, such as Passage Comprehension and Calculation. Calculation has motor components, so that might be its connection with Coding (and maybe, to a lesser extent, with Block Design), but not with Passage Comprehension. The only real connection PC has with the other relative low areas is sustained attention, which also affects speed.

Depending on your state, achievement scores that are at least average may be a tough sell for special education supports. However, given the OT results, you may be able to argue for 504 accommodations, preferably, in this case, ones for addressing her speed of work completion, such as:

1. reduced workload/items sufficient to demonstrate mastery. This responds to her personal weaknesses in processing speed, and might also contribute to accessing more advanced math. At a minimum, it would spare her from some of the repetition, if her current instruction is truly repetitious.

2. oral assessment/elaboration. For certain learners, whose minds work more quickly than their hands do, this can allow teachers to see a fuller representation of the student's true breadth of knowledge and depth of comprehension. In her case, there is an absurd discrepancy between her assessed oral language comprehension (150) and text-based language comprehension (91). (just shy of four standard deviations)

3. I would have loved to see some assessment of phonetic decoding skills and phonological processing, to see if possibly she might not be decoding efficiently (you would know better if there are any IRL concerns with her reading). She's a bit young yet for measures of oral reading fluency, but that would be another area to investigate at some point, given the moderate distance between her word calling and reading comprehension scores. Along the same lines, how is her spelling and writing (including handwriting)?

Thank you, seth! I really appreciate your thorough reply!

What is "low efficiency" an indication of? Is it related to processing speed or a measure of how she handles input?

I hadn't quite realized the breadth of difference between her oral comprehension and text comprehension. Thank you for pointing it out. As for IRL observation, I'd say I've been slightly confused by the slowness which which she learned to read for two reasons: 1. Her pre reading skills were always way ahead of standard developmental markers, and 2. She was always interested in books as a toddler - carrying them around, asking to be read to. It seemed like a natural interest that would take off early or at least once she started deciding given her intelligence. Until last summer when she turned six, I was just telling myself that the normal range to learn to read was 4-7 and that she was right in the pocket so no worries. Also that neurologists considered learning to read developmental, like night time toilet training and many posts in these forums talked about gifted kids who were late readers so I figured she was just in that catagory. She did write some letters and numbers backwards which I was told was normal for a 5-6 year old and that it would get better as she learned to read.

Jump ahead a year and she is reading "on grade level" but her 1st grade teacher said she lacked "fluency" at her assessed level. She continues to write the same letters and numbers backwards with regularity even though we've been working on those for two years. She can catch them sometimes afterwards but not always. When reading with her this spring, I noticed that she would read some words backwards like saw for was, or transpose letters like reading left for felt. She would also substitute a word that she knew fit the context of the book or sentence when she got fatigued and hit an unfamiliar word she was too tired to decide. That, in addition to reading some "b"s for "d"s and "n"s for "u"s. This is one of the reasons I requested and evaluation. Unfortunately, in the conclusion of the report, they note that she writes some letters backwards but that this is still developmentally normal at 7 and they don't think it's a learning disability. They also noted that they consider dyslexia a reading disorder not a learning disability. I don't know if she is dyslexic but these seems like they maybe markers of the condition and I'd like a more thorough evaluation of that. I've spoke to five parents in my neighborhood with older children (9/10yrs) who are dyslexic and the DOE missed it when testing them at 7. All of them got private tests done but with a cost of about $6,000 which would be extremely difficult for us to afford.


As for her handwriting, I'm not sure how to judge it but she has difficulty staying consistent with the height of her letters and will often cram words together, not leaving space between although she is very aware that she is supposed to. She was teaching a little friend who just entered kindergarten how to write a sentence today and she very carefully explained how to leave space. She just can't really do it herself. She has also started to display some real anxiety when required to write a sentence and wants to be as brief as possible. Whereas her vocal expressions has always invloved long complex sentences with advanced vocabulary, she tries to formulate the shortest possible sentence to write, sometimes leaving out articles and even nouns to the point that it's not a full sentence. When encouraged to write a full sentence, not even a long one, she can melt down.

Spelling is hard for me to assess because her school follows the Teacher's College at Columbia writers workshop method of letting the kids do phonetic spelling from kindergarten onwards, gradually starting to correct spelling in late second and third grade. The idea seems to be to not inhibit their expression and get them to enjoy writing and creative storytelling without the burden of having to be "right". That said, her words do make sense phonetically, I.e. usually, all of the sounds in the word are represented in what she writes, even if the correct letter isn't there.

I will definitely look more closely at potential ADHD or ADD. Sustained attention is certainly difficult for her. I'm guessing the DOE did not find that since the end of the report said they found no learning disorders. Can I ask them on Friday to do an assessment specifically for that or would the psychoeducational evaluation have covered it?

Thank you for your insights! I appreciate your list of possible actions to take and will address them in our meeting on Friday. You've been very helpful!

I'm going to be cynical and guess that reading disorders aren't covered by any legislation?

The written reversals, trouble with spacing, and anxiety about the physical process of writing sound like what I've always referred to as dysgraphia. In fact it was symptoms like that, that led my parents to get me tested. The clues also included going through erasers faster than pencils. Before testing I would erase lots of incorrect words/letters. Post-testing, my adaptation is to write over the error (which leaves a pretty recognizable pattern) or cross out the wrong word and keep going.

Here's an understood.org article on dyslexia vs. dysgraphia:
https://www.understood.org/en/learn...fference-between-dysgraphia-and-dyslexia

I'm so sorry, aeh! My iPhone autocorrect changed my typing to "seth" and I didn't catch it before posting!

Thank you! I will check out that article before tomorrow's meeting. My daughter definitely goes through a lot of erasers!

I don't think they tested her specifically for dyslexia or dysgraphia and I suspect it's because they think she's too young and the symptoms she's displaying are developmentally normal. I will ask them to test for it specifically, though!

Thank you!

Dyslexia is explicitly named in the DSM-V as a specific learning disorder in reading. OSEP guidance also states that it can be used interchangeably with SLD-reading.

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/speced/guid/idea/memosdcltrs/guidance-on-dyslexia-10-2015.pdf

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/speced/guid/idea/memosdcltrs/oseplettertounnerstall4-25-16dyslexia.pdf

If they have identified her with dyslexia, then they have identified her as having a specific learning disability in one of the federally-recognized academic skill areas.

I would agree with the suspicion of dysgraphia raised by mckinley. (Your description also sounds a lot like my #2, whose profile is mildly dyslexic, and more significantly dysgraphic.) The core deficit in dysgraphia in many individuals is actually difficulty attaining automaticity for basic skills. It is not unusual to see this same core deficit manifest in low processing speed (which is part of what I was referencing with "low efficiency"), poor reading fluency despite adequate phonetic decoding skills, and even difficulty with arithmetic fact fluency, despite average or above math reasoning and conceptual understanding. Because basic skills do not naturally become automatic ("second nature" or rote) for them, they have to divert a lot of higher-level thinking and processing to managing basic skills, instead of being able to use those high-level cognitive skills for rich expression, comprehension, or problem-solving. These are the learners who, as I often describe it, can form letters, spell accurately, or express complex language, but not all at the same time.

And on a side note, I would prefer that spelling be taught correctly from the start, and that the joy of language expression be captured through scribing and use of technology (speech-to-text, audio recordings of expressive language), rather than invented spelling. My experience is that, though typical readers/spellers do self-correct as they are exposed to more standard spelling instruction, it can be hard for non-natural spellers to root out early mis-learned spellings.

DOE does pay for reading remediation. DOE also pays for the $6500 private neuropsychs, but you are going to need help navigating all of this.

NYC does have a strong 2e group. TECA has a conference on November 9th that you might attend.

You describe a pretty familiar-sounding child. My DD (now 11) is dyslexic, dysgraphic, and mildly inattentive-ADHD, diagnosed when 7.

I will try not to dwell on the "dyslexia isn't LD" bit, though rude words are still coming out of me. Loudly. Suffice to say, as others noted above, they don't get to decide to remove dyslexia from the DSM, however much they'd like to.

What I wanted to add to the good advice above was just to re-iterate the incredible importance of reading (and spelling) remediation, and ASAP. While it's not always as purely miraculous as it was for us, it still makes a huge, huge difference. I just can't say strongly enough, get evidence-based remediation as soon as you can, any way you can, no matter what stalling tactics your school uses.

We ended up starting All About Reading (https://www.allaboutlearningpress.com/all-about-reading/) at home as a temporary emergency stop-gap when DD was diagnosed and the school didn't even want to meet with us to discuss her psych report for a month and a half. She was an anxiety-ridden mess and completely falling apart at school, as she had suddenly "hit the wall" in early grade 3. She could fake it for so long, and then suddenly, she couldn't. (Like yours, in Kindergarten I would have said she was way ahead of the pack in pre-reading and writing skills, but in the years after, the rest all moved on, and she didn't.)

Ultimately, we ended up continuing with All About Reading because there were no other good options for us (school said "not our problem"; private dyslexia tutors scarce and incompatible, not available daily, and never mind the price). And in the meantime, AAR was working, before our very eyes, extraordinarily well. The biggest impact was on her anxiety, when we stopped asking her to do things she couldn't, and asked only for reading that she had actually been explicitly taught to do. (I pretty much tossed all her homework, scribed everything that was unavoidable or actually useful, and simply told her teachers there were various things she wasn't going to do for a while, until she'd been explicitly taught how to do them. They didn't entirely like it, but at least in grade 3, I could get away with that, and her own teacher was supportive (albeit clueless), even if the school was not.)

At home, after-school remediation with an exhausted, introverted kid with LDs and anxiety that just wanted to collapse and be left alone in peace and quiet - - - well, it was pretty brutal. But it was also amazing and life changing.

So that's my soap-box. Get remediation. Proper, evidence-based dyslexia remediation (there are lots of perfectly good kinds out there - Barton, Wilson, etc; anything that is based on Orton-Gillingham is fine, but a generic "tutor" is not). Don't let anyone convince you to wait and see. Waiting is not benign, it's actively destructive at this age, and makes remediation (never mind the anxiety) so much harder to help later. And for bonus, whether she is ever formally diagnosed as dyslexic or "merely weak in coding", it actually doesn't matter, the solution is the same either way, and an explicit, phonological-based reading program will only help.

And again, your school eval did not include measures of phonetic decoding or its underlying skills, which means that the decent word calling scores may represent memorized sight words, rather than actual reading decoding skills. I would have preferred to see at least some subtests from the WJIV auditory processing, phonetic coding, or phoneme-grapheme knowledge clusters.

Definitely, I agree that, if you do not end up with school-based services, or it takes a really long time to get there, do pursue home-based OG remediation. I also used All About Learning's products (AAR was not yet published at the time, so we attacked it from the spelling side, with all seven levels of AAS), and highly recommend them. My DC went from avoiding and resisting all reading and writing activities to at least tolerating them, and occasionally enjoying high-interest ones, to placing into honors English (still doesn't love it, but at least it's no longer an obstacle). AAR/AAS are very easy for a parent to use, and also more affordable than Barton or Wilson tutoring by a certified provider (which is the only way to go for Wilson). You can also individualize pacing, by zipping through lessons that are already mastered or acquired quickly, and slowing down as much as needed for trickier skills. AAR has a reasonable amount of fluency practice built into it, but if that turns out not to be enough, I would look at HELPS (http://www.helpsprogram.org/), which is an evidence-based intervention specifically for reading fluency in learners who know how to decode phonetically, but not automatically. It's also free to very low-cost (free download, or low cost printed).

Thank you, everyone! Your feedback and advice has been invaluable!

To follow up, we had our meeting on Friday. A DOE school psychologist and special ed services provider were present. The psychologist seemed impatient and stated a couple of times that my daughter had average level acheivement scores and therefore she saw nothing wrong. I pointed out the OT Evaluation stating an obvious SPD issue and asked how they would explain the difference between her Verbal comprehension score and her reading comprehension score (thank you aeh). I said it seemed there was a definite problem if she can comprehend when hearing a passage but not very well when reading it herself.

I also noted the seeming problem with automaticity. The special ed services expert seemed to be the most receptive and understanding. She kept alluding to personal experiences with kids with a similar profile. In the end, they classified DD as needing services on the basis of OHI and have offered OT 2x per week and reading remediation 3x per week. They also are assigning an IEP for stipulations surrounding tests: more time, smaller group size, individual instructions, breaks, re-focusing.

im concerned about the timeline for getting these servic s started soon very grateful, Platypus101, for the suggestion to try AAR. I am looking that up and have talked it's her dad about starting it after school this week. Her anxiety and lack of joy with school is something I want to nip in the bud if possible.

I also appreciate hearing everyone's stories about themselves or their children with similar profiles. In response to my query about them doing an evaluation for dyslexia or dysgraphia, the psychologist leaned in and said, we don't worry about that until they're 9 yrs old. It's too early to be concerned with your daughter. I'm considering private testing now but that infuriated me given everything I've read and heard from fellow parents about late diagnosis.

EmmaL, you are right that I'll need help navigating it all. I'm looking into the links you provided - thank you!