Another thought for you, since your ds is 9 years old. My ds has a diagnosis/challege that has symptoms/behaviors that overlap with ADHD symptoms. His elementary school staff was fairly certain he had ADHD, so in the process of trying to determine does he or doesn't he, one thing I did at home was go over a "children's checklist" of ADHD symptoms - it was a list he could fill out, and it was really helpful in understanding what was going on with him. It's been quite a few years since he was 10 so I don't have the book at hand, but maybe you could google and find something similar.
polarbear
Incidentally, if going through a process with formal ADHD rating scales, some of them have self-report forms going down to age 6 (notably the BASC-2; beginning from around middle school for most of the others), which can help to pull out not only some of the symptoms (or non-symptoms) that are not as externally-noticeable, but also some of the emotional effects and self-perceptions that often go along with some kind of classroom struggle.
