Just a few random thoughts for you:
In the two years since, she has thrived in the program, which is pull out one day/week. We have been noticing some attention and maturity issues, more at home and in her regular classroom than in the gifted program, and wanted to get a full evaluation.
It could be that the reason you notice the attention and maturity issues in her regular school program vs in the gifted is due to the way the class/day is structured and the types of material covered, not just due to academics - this is a total *guess* of course, but the instructional approach and the types of projects, and amount of noise, activity, free-thinking etc that was allowed in our school district's gifted elementary school pull-out was extremely different than much of what went on in the classroom and it was in many instances an easier environment for kids who had ADHD or similar challenges to cope in. The activities also focused a lot on brain work, experimenting and discussing rather than the rote types of worksheet, repetitive exercises, etc that went on in regular class - so sometimes for kids who had LDs even (like my 2e ds) it was an easier place just to be, much less anxiety provoking than a regular classroom.
My daughter is a fluent writer, with good handwriting. She is a poor speller, and can spell the same word wrong more than one way on the same page. However, she is still one of the better spellers in her class, so maybe standards are just low these days.
How are you making the determination that she's one of the best spellers in class? Based on what you see in written paragraphs/stories of other kids etc, or based on spelling tests? Memorizing words for a spelling test is a bit of a different skill than spelling while writing - when you're in the middle of the act of writing there are quite a few other things to pay attention to such as grammar, punctuation, neatness, and of course, the ideas you are trying to put into the written words. I don't think it's terribly uncommon at your dd's age to spell better for tests than while writing. One thing that was different in our elementary school today than when I was in elementary school is that our kids' teachers didn't make them over-think spelling while writing, they wanted them to focus on ideas. Judging growth and ability in spelling accuracy was left for spelling tests. When they had writing assignments, the teachers usually had them circle two words that they found that were spelled wrong and correct them and that was it, no worries about the rest. When our kids were doing writing assignments for homework we (parents) were specifically told not to stop them while writing to correct spelling.
Most of her attention issues come from executive function--she has difficulty staying on task for undesirable or tedious tasks.
If you make a list over time of the specific tasks she has the most difficulty with staying on task, do you see any trends re the type of task? Any ideas of what makes the task undesirable or tedious?
With both symbol search and coding relatively low scores for your dd, I'm wondering - is there any possibility she might have a slight vision issue? Those tasks both depend on vision.
Was there any kind of behavioral survey completed by parents/teachers included as part of the eval? Was there any executive function testing other than the ADHD test?
It sounds like you had an inexperienced, disinterested tester. If the degree to which you're seeing attention issues in your dd seems large to you, or if it's interfering at school, it would be helpful to have a more in-depth eval which would look into specific issues such as why the processing speed scores (both subtests) seem low relative to the others, etc.
I'm also just curious what the test was where the tester asked your dd to make up stories - it doesn't sound like anything I've heard of before, so just curious!
Best wishes,
polarbear
