Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Can you help me make sense of these test results?

Ah! In our experience, homeschooling makes things easier with a fast input/slow output kid.

Before I saw his test scores and realized that DS's processing speed was significantly lower than his "thinking speed" (if you will), I was pretty impatient with him, just as his public school teachers had been. Once I realized that this was not dawdling, but that slow output was part of his nature, I allowed more time and was less cranky about how long he took to do things. We both got a lot happier!

On the bright side, he seems to be getting faster as he gets older. I'm not sure if this is a function of age or practice or what, but he seems to get through a lot more material than he did last year--I mean a lot more! Perhaps you'll see something similar?

I would strongly suggest that you seek a comprehensive speech & language eval. Many children "grow into" higher level language disabilities as they get older. That is, at a younger age it is difficult to discern whether something is a purely developmental artifact that they will "grow" out of or an area of disability.

Once they reach an age where the problem should clearly have improved due to a combination of maturity and instruction, if the problem persists then that strongly suggests an underlying disability in language processing. It may be auditory processing (which may also be involved in his slow writing production) or some other language related issue. The fact that he is also struggling with spelling sounds to me like a speech eval makes sense.

Hopefully, if the psychologist is a good clinician, she will recommend one to you.

Depending on where you live there may be resources for a low cost speech eval. Scottish Rites has Childhood Speech & Language Centers scattered all over the country and their services are completely free. However they have long waiting lists and you need to get him on their list before he turns 12.

Another resource may be nearby colleges with Speech Pathology graduate programs. These often have a speech & language center where students provide supervised services at low cost.

Thanks, all. I don't have the WISC subset scores but I do have the achievement scores. She said he has mild dyslexia (orthographic dyslexia, aka stealth dyslexia) and mild dysgraphia.

Ok his scores are-this is from the Wechsler achievemnet test-

reading 86%
reading comprehension 91%
spelling 53%
numerial operations 88%
problem solving 92%
math composite 94%

She said she would give me grade level equivilants later. I am not really sure how to read these..she said the mean for the percents is 50. Yes, we may do another speech /language eval (he had one when he was 6) and we are taking him for a vision assessment.