DD did the WIAT for writing when she was just over age 9. She wrote only 3 sentences (and she wasn't even on-topic) but that somehow produced an average score. My original concern as presented to the school district was that I am concerned that she hardly ever writes more than 3-4 sentences for assignments. I thought the WIAT would show the problem, but it didn't because they just required a short sample. The language arts standards put forth by the state require much more than a student in fourth grade being able to write 3 sentences, but none of the testing picked that up. They didn't look at her classroom work other than one two-sentence writing sample. They said "But she wrote 17 words per sentence!" Ummm....that's nice, but it doesn't solve the problem of her not writing more than 2-3 sentences in class. I had her independently evaluated and he gave her the TOWL. Scores still in the average range, except for the spontaneous writing part. She had to write a story based on a picture and wrote 2 sentences. This time, there were not enough words, and he couldn't score it. I think of it this way--basically kids scoring in the 1st percentile write more for that part of the test than DD did. If her story had a few more words, it would have been scorable. I'm not sure if her score would have been average or not, in that case (because the scoring is based on more than the amount that they write, and she writes well on a sentence level).
The diagnosis was not dysgraphia (although I think there is some argument about how that is defined, and the neuropsych did not want to classify her as that for whatever reason). He said her issue is ADHD which leads to executive dysfunction, and her problem is organization and planning issues. You might want to ask for testing to check for executive dysfunction.
