My advice would be to seek a broad evaluation - neuropsych or educational eval - rather than an ADHD-specific evaluation, because some of the things you've mentioned sound more like LD-type challenges, and some of the fidgety-ness and inability to focus *could* be ADHD or they *might* be due to a different type of challenge. There's most likely a clue in the gap in scores on your ds' WISC testing - but he'll most likely need some more testing plus a good look at developmental history to determine *why* there is the gap.
Please note - I am *not* parenting a gifted child with ADHD - but when they were your child's age, two of my children had behaviors that *looked* very much like ADHD. Your ds especially has a lot of things in common with my older dd when she was your ds' age - and she was a child that other people would look at and think she was obviously ADHD - even her ped was convinced she had ADHD - but in reality, she had a vision issue. She also had the large gap in PSI on her WISC - which was due to the vision issue. After she went through vision therapy and no longer had double vision and tracking issues, her focus and ability to follow multi-step directions improved tremendously.
Re the reading tests - when you're trying to chase down the cause of differences in tests like this, it's important to look at every single bit and piece of info you have about the test - not just what it was testing, but how was it administered (were the instructions given orally, did your ds reply orally or with handwriting, was it timed, etc). Did the test include visual cues? My dd with the vision problem scored really low on a cognitive test when she was little, so she was referred for further testing due to concern that she was cognitively impaired (this was through the school district at 3 - which meant she scored below the 25th percentile in whatever cognitive assessment they used as a screener) - then she aced the more in-depth eval the district gave her. I walked away from that whole thing feeling like an idiot parent! It wasn't until years later when we she was finally diagnosed with her vision challenge that I realized the difference in scores wasn't due to her actual IQ/ability - it was due to the way the tests were administered - the first test was questions cued from a set of visual cards, the second eval was all oral questions.
The other thing with reading evals is that reading requires a large number of very specific skills - so a little something off in one area could throw one test off but not another - we've seen this with my 2e dd who has a challenge with a certain type of memory that impacts her ability to associate sounds with letter symbols. We knew from an educational eval that she had the memory challenge, but it took an incredibly detailed and thorough reading assessment by a reading specialist to really understand the impact of the challenge on her reading skills. The thing is, I wouldn't want to go into that type of a specialist eval (reading or otherwise) without first having the comprehensive eval when there are the variety of things going on that you've mentioned above.
Best wishes,
polarbear
Last edited by polarbear; 06/05/14 07:55 PM.
