I'm a bit overwhelmed, just had a conversion with psychologist about my DS15's testing results. The psychologist doesn't have a written report for me yet. Partly because she has another test she wants to do, but DS is at camp so I can't get him back to her for a few weeks. Her overall take is that he clearly is a 2-E kid, and that he has severe anxiety problems that get in the way of schooling and testing.
One thing I was surprised by is how low his overall WISC-IV results came out. I don't have all the numbers at this time, he had what she called very superior scores for the math/visual part. (137) And very superior scores of most of the english/language part. But Average scores in social comprehension, working memory and processing speed. These are 2 standard deviations lower than everything else enough she thinks we should qualify for an IEP based on this. He also did very well on the achievement tests doing a 98% in math, and above 90% in reading comprehension. But as expected fell apart completely when asked to write an essay. And surprisingly when she did more tests on his memory skill, did very well on all the sub-tests.
The testing still left the written language disorder still a possibility. But because of his high anxiety around writing she wasn't able to tease that detail out. Along with the anxiety it's clear that interest makes a HUGE difference and clearly significantly affected the testing. His Executive Skills were surprisingly very high, but she suggest this is only when the task is for very well defined tasks. But his did have problems with Pragmatic Judgement. The other big issue was his social skills and emotional stability. After looking at all the tests she considers him borderline ASD, and want to do another test to see if she can get more information. It's not clear if certain symptoms were a result of his anxiety or symptoms of ASD. He meets just enough that she could write such a diagnosis if it's what we really want.
One suggestion is we look at talking with a psychiatrist and look into the idea of medication for his anxiety/depression. I need to talk with his psychologist before we go that route. (I have someone else doing this testing.) Last week while on vacation, I talked with a friend who has a kid with severe school anxiety and medications have really helped them. I'm going to have to look at this further I must admit it makes me a bit uncomfortable.
She also had a LONG list of what would be helpful for him, working with his psychologist, working with the education therapist, more social skills class, cognitive behavior therapy. Honestly there isn't time to do all this, and classes and homework, and his fun/social activities like band and robotics, and Aikido. At some point we are going to have to pick and choose.
A few questions that I can maybe figure out by googling. Can anyone explain more what working memory is? And more detail about what Executive Skills are?
Last edited by bluemagic; 08/04/14 01:01 PM.
