Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Daughter Dislikes School - WISC-V and WIAT-III

My daughter, L, is 9. She underwent ability and achievement testing, and I would appreciate feedback on the results.

I suspect L is Autistic with ADHD. She is incredibly creative, social and original. She loves to build, make and invent. She enjoys writing, drawing, sculpting, programming, cooking, etc. She prefers to make her own designs, rather than following instructions. She is really interested in biographies, but other than that, she does not usually enjoy learning non-fiction facts, e.g. about Science or History. She loves novelty and adventure, and is usually in motion. When she gets an idea for a project she is unstoppable.

She constantly seeks high stimulation, especially tactile, visual, auditory and vestibular. She is very sensitive to taste and smell. When she was younger, she was very avoidant of noise and touch.

Up until about 18 months old, sign language was L's primary means of communication. She knew hundreds of signs. Once she started primarily talking, it was very difficult to understand her words. Even at age 3, it was still difficult for strangers to understand her. I could understand her well the whole time, and was almost always with her because she had severe separation anxiety. She learned words very quickly, both signed and spoken, often after seeing/hearing them just 1-2 times.

She is in grade 4 at a French Immersion school. When she entered the school in Kindergarten, she learned French amazingly quickly. Her principal and teacher said she was an outlier, and the principal said she thought L is "at least highly gifted," verbally.

Her fine motor skills are not naturally strong, but because she has so much practice writing and drawing, she can make her writing look typical for her age when she concentrates.

L wanted to learn how to write when she was 3, and did so by asking us to tell her which letters to write to print words. She very quickly learned how to print all of the letters, and learned their sounds. She could spell a lot of words, and spelled others phonetically. She could read words, but did not choose to read books. Between 3-5 she wrote a lot, including several picture books with a lot of text. During these years she would read words here and there, but would almost never choose to read a book. She eventually started reading books when she was almost 6. She prefers books with lots of pictures, especially graphic novels. She has only recently started to read books without pictures. For leisure, she chooses to read English books that are slightly below her grade level. She reads for fun every day now.

Ever since she was about 2 years old, she has disliked listening to books read aloud by others. She says she finds it boring. Before that age, being read to was one of her favorite activities.

I was suprised at how difficult it was for L learn to read in both English and French, after she'd been writing for so many years, and was very strong orally in both languages. When reading aloud in English, she would skip words and guess words based on their first letter. Then a year later, when we started working on home reading in French, I was surprised to see her go through the same long phase. She still doesn't sound completely fluent when she reads aloud, even at grade level.

One possible explanation for her choice to not read much in earlier years is that a developmental optometrist found that she had mild convergence insufficiency when she was 6, that I assume was worse when she was younger. The reading headaches that prompted our visit disappeared soon after, without us doing the vision therapy that was offered, but not recommended. At a recent optometrist appointment, her convergence was still not great, but the optometrist was not concerned.

She has very strong Mathematical reasoning ability. She is not very eager to learn new Math, but she deeply understands the Math she knows. She comes up with creative ways to solve Math problems. She would rather solve a type of Math problem she's never seen before than a type she has, and she's amazingly adept at doing so, which is a skill that's rare even among Math majors in University.

She enjoys academic activities that involve creating or inventing. For example, she enjoys making presentations, writing, doing art and setting Math problems for other people. She doesn't enjoy listening to lectures, reading to learn information or doing worksheets. Most of her school day is filled with non-creative activities, so she finds most of her day at school boring. She has the option to homeschool, but she chooses to attend school because she craves social interaction. We use her gifted IEP to remove some of her most painful points during the school day. The biggest accommodation is that she can test out of lectures and worksheets for Math units, and work on her own projects. But she still finds most of the day tedious.

She is not careful during activities, whether or not she is interested in the activity. On every Math test she gets several questions wrong due to misreading questions and not being careful with tedious tasks like counting vertices or adding large numbers. But she also is not careful when working on projects she's really interested in at home. Her attitude has changed a lot since she was 4-5, and had very high expectations for her art and crafts that were out of reach for even the most skilled kids her age. Back then, she seemed to struggle with perfectionism, but it appears to me that her attitude is now the opposite.

Here are the scores from the assessment:
[removed]

The Psychologist, P, wrote in the report that L complained a lot about being bored during the assessments, especially during the WIAT. I asked him what he thought L means by "bored", since we hear her say that word so often. He said he thinks it means the task is unpleasant to perform. He thinks some output tasks are challenging because of her relative weakness in CPI, but not challenging intellectually, and repetition of those tasks is frustrating. He also said that he agrees that the WIAT is boring.

P commented that L didn't follow instructions in the Essay Composition subtest, and that it's not uncommon for her age.

I asked P about L's answers during the Comprehension subtest on the WISC because I read on these forums that sometimes Autistic students perform poorly on it, but L did well. He said that the pattern of questions she got wrong could be consistent with a hypothesis that she's Autistic because she did not perform as well on questions where social understanding is necessary.

P also mentioned that he thought that sometimes during the administration of the WIAT, L had a thought that was difficult for her to express orally or in writing. This isn't something I've noticed, but my verbal interaction with her is mostly during conversation.

I would appreciate any insights into what the assessment results say about L's learning profile.

I also have a few specific questions:
- Her Vocabulary subtest score is lower than I would expect based on how quickly she learned French and English vocabulary. It seems likely that it is low because she doesn't read or listen to above-grade-level books. Are there any other possible contributing factors that seem likely, given her profile?
- Is it surprising that her listening comprehension and reading comprehension scores are around a standard deviation below her VCI? Whether or not it's statistically surprising, it's surprising to me that her comprehension is only in the high average range. What can cause comprehension difficulties? Is ADHD a possible cause? Is it possible that lower comprehension explains why she doesn't like to read or listen to long books?
- Is her performance on the Sentence Repetition task, on which she scored in the 53rd percentile, surprising, given her cognitive profile? How correlated are Sentence Repetition scores to Digit Span Forward?
- My biggest concern is that L dislikes going to school. It's clear that part of the problem is the mismatch between her ability and the pace of learning. I think another issue is the mismatch between her preference for creative activities and the types of activities assigned in school. But is there anything in her scores that suggests that her dislike of school may be partially based on cognitive or physical struggles?

Thank you.

Welcome!

Your DC sounds like a delightful, high-energy, creative young person.

The feedback you've received from your psych is thoughtful and nuanced, from what I can tell, and should be the best place to start from in terms of understanding the evaluation data.

A couple of general observations, trying not to duplicate too much of what you've already reported:

1. Perhaps you could elaborate a bit more on why you suspect autism. I am not seeing a clear pattern of that based on what you've reported. Some behaviors do align with ASD, such as sensory sensitivies, executive function issues, and some early anxiety, but the key feature is really social communication and interaction skills, and the only information we have on that is that she is incredibly social and craves social interaction, which, if anything, would be more likely to point us in the opposite direction (although individuals on the spectrum can be interested in social interaction as well). The item analysis from the WISC-V Comprehension subtest could suggest some relative impairments of this nature, but they might also be related to the gaps in cause-and-effect thinking that often occur in individuals with executive function disorders like ADHD. It's true that ASD and ADHD co-occur at a pretty high rate, but so far, there appears to be more data supportive of ADHD alone than of the two together.

2. The convergence insufficiency certainly seems like a reasonable explanation for much of the early reluctance to read. Even if decoding was not difficult, if reading involved prolonged eyestrain, I can imagine that it became an aversive activity. That emotional response to reading may not have entirely been overcome, except when text is highly-engaging. Her ongoing dysfluent reading may or may not be related to her reading history, since she has had less reading practice at this point than she would otherwise have had. I should note, too, that your perception of her oral reading fluency is probably in reference to what you already have experienced of her verbal cognition and oral fluency, since formal testing found her oral reading fluency on grade-level text to be at the top of the average range, bordering on above average. Not exactly delayed! But it -is- substantially lower than her oral word fluency, which was at the 98th %ile, a full standard deviation higher than her oral reading fluency. And it is clear from testing that, even when somewhat bored, she is able to apply phonics to sound out words quite well. So the skills are there, but perhaps applied only when forced to do so. That would suggest that the early reading behavior (in both languages) of guessing and skipping may have been attentional in origin.

3. Another reference check: it is actually not all that unusual for the oral language of two and three year olds to be unintelligible in unknown speech, as your DC's was. Toddler-speak is quite often perfectly understandable to the child's closest caregivers (often parents), while being quite unintelligible to everyone else. My takeaway from this would be that (as with handwriting), your DC's oral-motor skills were no more advanced than the next child's, despite very strong language skills, which made her oral language rich and complex, but comprehensible only to those familiar with its idiosyncrasies.

4. And a little anecdotal comment: some of your DC's profile feels very familiar (though not identical) to me, as one of ours was also a very active, creative, social young learner who far preferred inventing one's own to following someone else's design. We used tiny private schools that were willing to make some accommodation for the first several years (such as early entry, curriculum compacting by testing out of units or chapters in math, SSA, whole-grade skip, etc.) until the last TPS ran out of sufficiently advanced material (well, technically, they offered to completely individualize DC's academics) before DC ran out of grades at the school, and we decided to move to homeschooling. Our DC has many qualities which overlap with the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, but has never been diagnosed, and now functions quite well as a university student. Many of the most overt behaviors lessened every time we made an instructional adjustment for a better match, but they never went away entirely. We've consciously framed these qualities as "things to know about yourself", rather than deficits, but also managed them with frequent conversation, modeling and reinforcement regarding developing a broader repertoire of executive functions. After many years of intentional parenting on this, as well as DC's own choices and efforts, these underlying qualities are now more often charming and creative than disruptive or annoying (either to DC or to others).

In response to your specific questions:
1. vocabulary: Yes, that is likely the principal factor. I would also add that a child who has been in French immersion for the entire formal educational experience is not fully comparable to the norm group for this test (in either English or French; I assume the English version was administered). What is known about dual language learners is that there are some early lags compared to monolingual learners, but that long-term, they develop stronger metalinguistic/higher-level language skills.

2&3. lc/rc vs VC: There are a number of possible explanations for these, some of which are located in the learner, some of which reside in the instrument, and the principal one of which is simply statistical. If you are familiar with the concept of regression to the mean, that would be the first and simplest explanation. I can illustrate this with a rough ballpark calculation: most achievement tests have a correlation of about .6 with most cognitive measures. So an FSIQ of +2 SDs would predict achievement scores of about +1.2 SDs, which translates in her specific case to about 122--not too far off of nearly all of the obtained achievement scores, with the exception of SC and NO, which are just a bit higher than predicted (but within the range consistent with the FRI).

For LC, other factors may be related to attention/working memory particularly as it impacts the ODC component score. (Note that receptive vocabulary is up in the 90th %ile, while ODC is only the equivalent of about standard score 109.) Your next question, which I'll address here in the middle of this one, is about SR and DSF, and has relevance to ODC as well. All three tasks are quite sensitive to attention/working memory effects, and all ended up in the same range of performance (if we convert them all to standard scores: DSF 105, SR 101, ODC 109). When I see a profile where the DS subscores are stronger in the manipulation conditions (DSB & DSS) than in the rote memory condition (DSF), I wonder about attentional factors. And then we see confirmatory data on other tasks with significant attentional loads, such as the very similar sentence repetition task, which is also a verbatim auditory memory task. ODC, again, is presented entirely in the auditory mode, and allows for no repetitions, so it has even heavier auditory memory demands, but also has a little more space for compensating with higher-level cognition, since answering with the gist sometimes is enough.

There is one other outlier with regard to memory span, which is the picture span task, which scored more like the DS manipulation tasks, and may have benefited from having visual supports, whether because it helped with maintaining attention (and you note that she prefers books with pictures in them), or if visual memory is simply stronger in some ways. I am going to postulate that she may have preferred being read to when she was very young because all of the read-aloud books for that age have pictures in them. As a middle-grades child, read-aloud books are much less likely to have pictures in them, which doesn't allow her to compensate for whatever it is that affects auditory attention (dysregulated attention, auditory processing, etc.) with visual supports.

Many of the same arguments with regard to ODC and the possible impacts of dysregulated attention also apply to RC, as literal comprehension requires noticing the details, and inferential comprehension requires maintaining the thread all the way through the text, in order to make connections between information in different places. The types of text she enjoys reading are very high stimulation, and often plot-driven, rather than character-driven, which probably helps her to sustain attention long enough to enjoy the narrative progression, and also doesn't require her to pick up on subtleties to follow complex character development. In addition, though, the ceiling on RC is capped a bit by the item-set format. That is, all grade four students, regardless of strength, read the same passages (unless they are particularly challenged, in which case they might drop down to an earlier item set; but no one reads above grade-level sets). So earning an exceptionally high score on RC requires both making extremely few errors and providing sufficient elaboration on correct responses to obtain full credit.

4. school: you've already received some good insights from your psych, and your own observations sound quite reasonable to me. The only thought I think I would add to this is to consider following up a bit on the question of dysregulated attention and other executive functions. A learner who is significantly underchallenged (as your child appears to be) might quite reasonably present as inattentive or bored in school, but as we've discussed, there are also some aspects of her evaluation data that suggest there may be an underlying vulnerability in regulation of attention that is being amplified by her instructional mismatch. (e.g., ADHD)

In terms of homeschool vs institutional school, perhaps it would be worth having a conversation with DC regarding what exactly she likes and dislikes about school. On the one hand, she dislikes going to school. On the other hand, you have stated that homeschool is not an option because she is highly socially-motivated. But at some point, the attraction of school for social contacts may not be outweighed by the frustration of instructional mismatch (on top of an already stimulation-seeking brain). It may be that the tenuous balance you have been maintaining between the two is tipping. School is also not the only solution to social interaction (although it is very convenient). When we moved to homeschooling the DC I mentioned above, DC was not actually happy with it, because of the social aspect, but agreed to the switch because it was clear that instructionally, that was the best solution. We did what we could to maintain opportunities for satisfying social contacts in other ways (extracurriculars, faith community, homeschool coop/meetups, etc.). We even tried to maintain connections with the school for school-based social activities (field day, family events, school carnival). Possibly your school would allow something like this, with loose connections to afterschool clubs, attending school only for certain days, such as to participate in specials (art, gym, music, computer), etc. School vs homeschool doesn't necessarily have to be all or nothing. (And fwiw, years later, DC told us that it was the right decision.)

Thank you, aeh, for the welcome, and thank you for the detailed feedback on DD's profile. I really appreciate you taking the time, both for this post, and for others you've made that I've learned a lot from.

Yes DD is delightful! It's been amazing to watch her drive and creativity. She's very much her own person.

1. My mind is open on the issue of DD being Autistic. I agree that she has some traits that are unusual in Autistic people. Her younger brother has ASD-1, ADHD and gifted diagnoses. When DS was diagnosed, I read a lot about autism. Some things I read reminded me of DD. Here are a few examples from the social realm:
- Recently, I showed DD a quiz about love languages for fun. She was very excited about her top "love language". She insisted her father take the quiz. When he ended up with a different top "love language", DD had a meltdown bigger than we've seen in years. She was angry because she thought that his preference was wrong. I think she was having trouble taking his perspective.
- Occasionally I hear DD call a classmate by the wrong name. Recently, she's been reading her school yearbook a lot, and I wonder if she's practicing face to name mappings.
- In grade 1, DD had a group of friends that played together at recess. She led them to play a game of pretend in which she was the teacher and they were students. For weeks, she taught them facts each day about a video game that many of the kids had never played. She assigned them homework, and created report cards at home with critical comments on them, and had them in her backpack to hand to the "students" at recess. I was never present for their play, but I would be surprised if there weren't signs of disinterest from the other kids.
- She prefers to play with younger kids.
- She talks to adults as though they're peers, which can sound impolite. For example, she might say "c'mon, I'm not going to do that" to a friend's parent.

We don't see behavior like first three examples often, but the last two are common.

Sometime, I'd like to seek out a specialist in giftedness and autism in individuals that mask, for an assessment for DD. If she is Autistic, it would be nice for her to understand herself better. I also anticipate that if she is, she may struggle socially as expectations for social interactions become more complex.

2. Your suggestion that eyestrain led to reading becoming an aversive activity fits very well with what we saw during that period. And our expectation that ability to write should lead to ability to read made her aversion worse too. You make a good point that her fluency is actually above grade level.

3. I think you're right that the asynchrony between the content and delivery of her speech contributed to my perception that her pronunciation was poor for her age. Point well taken.

4. Thank you for sharing your experience with your similar DC. It's wonderful that you were able to keep DC engaged throughout grade school, and also able to build awareness of their unique ways of thinking, and teach them tools to support their executive function. I hope to do the same for my children. It's also useful to hear that a more appropriate instructional level helped alleviate some attentional challenges.

1. That's a good point about her not being quite comparable to the norm group due to immersion in a second language.

2 & 3. That makes sense that regression to the mean makes the achievement scores unsurprising.

I appreciate you pointing out the contrasts and similarities between scores that are related to each other. It isn't too surprising to me that she found it easier to remember pictures, whether that's due to more interest or stronger visual memory.

Your hypothesis about her dislike of being read to being related to us starting to read books with fewer pictures sounds very reasonable. I wish we had tried harder to read books that were more engaging to her back when she stopped wanting to read. Bringing lots of books that were interesting to her into the house was a big factor in her starting to read for fun.

4. Thank you for the advice to follow up on attention challenges. We followed up with the psych. Based on his observations during assessment, plus parent and teacher surveys, and a meeting with me, he diagnosed DD with ADHD-C.

I think it's a good idea for me to re-open the discussion about homeschool with DD. I agree that there are many opportunities for social contact when homeschooling. I like the idea of seeing if she can be involved in some school activities. DS homeschools, and it's a great way to accommodate his extreme asynchrony.

DD has some amazing strengths, including many that arise from the atypical ways she thinks and senses. I hope to support her to be aware of those differences and to appreciate their strengths, while also helping her learn tools she can use in areas where the differences cause challenges.

Thank you very much for your insight!

In response to your anecdotes on social behavior:
-I see what you are saying regarding perspective-taking. That is certainly a plausible explanation for the meltdown. Did his results also perhaps not comport with how she has historically related to him? If what she has been offering him as communications of love is quite different from what he turns out to identify as his preferred mode, then accepting his results would also have required her to confront possibly having "disappointed" him (even though, as a parent, he probably received all of her offerings in the spirit in which they were intended; but she might not understand that from her perspective as a child, purely for developmental reasons).
-That's a thought-provoking hypothesis, and a good observation.
-As far as playing highly-organized and detailed school...well, that was DC1! Except with younger siblings, with whom DC was quite persuasive (so much so that DC2 was a bit disappointed with the excellent preschool teacher who followed this experience). We apparently had insufficient numbers of children (for DC1's purposes!), so there were a lot of imaginary students in the class too. And DC1 is quite far from being on the spectrum. Your DC may or may not have had willing or fully-engaged participants (we don't know one way or the other), but it isn't impossible that they actually thought it was fun.
-Playing with younger children does usually suggest some level of social skill delay, so yes, that's something to watch, but children with ADHD also often have social skills delays, since you really have to pay attention all the way through interactions in order to learn how to navigate them.
-Also a valid point to watch. But also, some precocious (GT or otherwise) children don't fully recognize adult/child boundaries for other reasons. And, again, it's not uncommon in children with ADHD, for the reasons already noted.

Bottom line, these are all worth watching and storing away as observations, but not really definitive either way. (Not that helpful, I know!) It's particularly challenging to tease out both ADHD and ASD-like symptoms in females, as both do not always present the way they do in males. And, of course, most of the research literature is still on boys...

If the ADHD becomes better managed, you may be able to start to see some clarity over time.

Thank you for your perspective on my anecdotes. Your idea about DD possibly being concerned about disappointing her father does sound like a very plausible alternate explanation. It's also interesting to hear that the adult/child boundary fuzziness could also be caused by either giftedness or ADHD. I love the story of your DC2's disappointment with the reality of teachers, after having DC1 be their first.

I agree that it will be interesting to see how DD evolves socially, if we can help her manage her ADHD.