DS 9 got officially diagnosed with both dyslexia and dysgraphia this week. I suspected he would come back with the diagnosis. It made sense from what I have seen of him. What surprised me a bit were his IQ scores. The tester gave him the Woodcock Johnson Cognitive test, with which I am less familiar. DD 11 scored PG on the WISC. She does not have a learning disability. My son's scores on the WJ cog were pretty much at the low end of gifted, with processing scores and some others being much lower. Some of the subtest scores were in the high 90's percentile. But this doesn't really match what I see. I honestly expected him to come back lower than my daughter in some areas, but higher in others.

My daughter's scores shocked me, so maybe I just don't have a good sense of what gifted really looks like, but my son is usually the head-turner. He has a very quirky but sharp intellect, asking all kinds of questions, and making incredibly creative leaps. He isn't a high achiever type, but he does think very deeply and creatively. He is a very good tournament chess player. No prodigy, but often wins local tournaments. He can listen to high level audio books and have a nuanced understanding both for detail and for foreshadowing, etc. In other words, given what I have seen, I really would have thought his scores would have been higher.

I think some of the what happened could have been that he got a little too creative with some of the answers. The tester told me that when he had to pick two pictures that go together, he took a long time, and so did not get credit for many of his answers. Knowing him, he was over-thinking it. He is super, super creative, and always sees things in a quirky way that other people don't think of.

The tester also said that his visual memory was poor. Again, I'm not sure if this could affect his score. What I see from him academically is that he can be quite advanced in math, etc. He is working 1.5 grades ahead, and catches on to concepts quickly, but has trouble retaining procedures, so he can astound me with how quick he is one day, and the next day, it is like he forgot what he was doing the day before.

I can say that, compared to DD, he doesn't have her vocabulary. That is where I can see her verbal gifts in spades. But he finds patterns so quickly! When we are doing puzzles of some kind, he is the one who will grasp it the fastest. For example, they were taught sudoku together. My son got the idea faster than DD even though he is younger.

I will also add that, FWIW, my son has more gifted personality traits than DD. He can be somewhat intense, with obsessive interests, and has some OE's.


So I would love any insight into whether it is possible his IQ score is an under-representation of his ability. The tester did not think so, but she is not a specialist in 2e. And is there any sense that the WJ might be a "worse" test for a dyslexic and dysgraphic child than the WISC or the SB?

Thanks in advance.