One quick CORRECTION, for clarity:

"and by the beginning of ninth grade, she was testing at 9th grade on the same test"

should read:

"and by the beginning of 3rd grade, she was testing at 9th grade on the same test [Accelerated Reader STAR reading test]"

Thanks, aeh! I have been lurking on this board for several years, and I had hoped you'd answer.

This is the gist:

"More importantly, what is -she- concerned about? Is she happy in school? Not unusually stressed by her educational experience? Would you have been worried about her if you didn't know her achievement scores? Are there IRL concerns? ... Does she frequently have difficulty completing assignments/assessments in a timely fashion?"

And that's what's not clear.

This last school year, things have been pretty good. In particular, one of her best friends from public school moved to her new school, and so she has that solid best-friendy relationship she really wants, and she has someone to work with on most of the big projects. I think she is very stimulated working together with another kid whom she likes and gets along with (in fact, the fact that she seems to work well with other kids and gets a lot out of it, is one of the main reasons I'm not homeschooling, even though there are some major problems at this school). I do not believe that the other girl is doing all of the work (though I don't know for sure) - my daughter is very engaged and knowledgeable, and fights, in a nice way, to do things her way. I think it's more that having some else to work with is fun and stimulating and that it lessens her perfectionism - if my BF thinks this is good enough, then I guess it's good enough (teachers won't be mad), and we can keep going.

In 5th grade, there has been much less daily homework than in 3rd and 4th grades. With regard to some big projects that had to be done mostly at home - on 2/3, she has worked with the BF, which keeps her much calmer and more enthusiastic. But, as I alluded to before, at times during both 3rd and 4th grades (and once in a while during 5th grade), she's had crying jags over homework - starting too late in the evening, feeling overwhelmed. This almost always has to do with writing, although I think once there were some calculations / worksheety thing in science that was hard to understand. Oh yeah, and in 4th grade, occasionally upset over Khan Academy exercises, when she would make a mistake, sometimes a miscalculation but sometimes just pushing the wrong button, and having to start the 5-problem sequence over again.

She is VERY affected by missing sleep, also by late meals. You could easily just say that a lot of this stress is a kind of perfectionism (rising to her own standards) combined with fear over teacher disapproval (teachers sometimes grumpy and unreasonable, in unpredictable ways).

And yeah, she has had trouble with finishing things, sometimes. Sometimes I know just what's going on, and it's NOT about vision or even a bad kind of perfectionism. In 4th grade, a teacher assigned writing poems, several of them, in one weeks, and she tried to take a lot of care with them - plays on words, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, alluding to things without being blunt about them. The teacher said it should take only 30 minutes, at most, but she spent more than an hour and still wasn't finished. That was just wanting to write a good poem, and I thought that was fine, and it was more about a bad assignment and unreasonble teacher - why force a child to write 3 poems in 3 days, rather than 1 more satisfying and higher quality poem in 3 days? (No reason!) And during 3rd grade, when she was still in the public school gifted pull-out, the teacher was frustrated that she spent too much time "thinking" about her story before writing it down - she had a long plot with a lot of details that she hadn't thought out completely, but they were there in her head. And so other kids were starting their 3rd piece of writing when she was still on her 1st. I finally had to sit with her one weekend before the thing was due and have her dictate a "skeleton" to me, to show her that she either needed to cut details, or break to story into 2 or more parts, so she could finish one (it was to be "published" with the class'), and then I typed it for her for several hours while she dictated to me. That assignment was supposed to have been finished in class. That same year, she had been punished by her main teacher (not given candy when other kids were) for her bad handwriting, and that, in combination with the gifted teacher's responses to her, made her very resistant to writing, fiction or non-fiction, for about 9 months, until she got a better teacher in 4th grade at the new school, who coaxed her along and rehabilitated her really well. Now she's writing 14-page screenplays at home, so that's certainly better! Let's see what else - she wasn't able to write down the spelling list words in the time alotted in public school.

Whether she's slower than average, I don't know. Whether she had (and now ocassionally has) crying jags and feels overwhelmed about her work, more so than the average child her age, I don't know. She plays it close to the vest at school, so the teachers there wouldn't necessarily know, and they're pretty disorganized so I don't necessarily trust what they say in either direction. (For example, an email will come out saying that your child should be finished with 3 out of 5 steps in a project, and DD#2 will be half-way through the 1st step, but then I'll find out that lots of other kids are at the exact same stage. Or they might not tell me, or even notice, if she's not finishing things as quickly as others.) It's in the evenings or on weekends, when I have her, when she tended to fall apart. Even at the worst times, in 3rd and 4th grades, I don't have to sit with her to do homework and projects more than I did with DD#1 (in fact, it's less so), but DD#1 has an ADHD diagnosis, so not the best person to measure against!

I am actually kind of more concerned about the PSI tests than the achievement tests. The psychologist's report includes remarks that make it sound like she's going to have a tough life because of the disparity between PSI and 3 other indices. And do I see it IRL? I just don't know. Sometimes it does seem like I do. Now that they have very little homework (and since they have no standardized tests) and with a very flexible, warm language arts teacher, not so much.

I appreciate your looking up the tables to tell me how (not) rare the VCI/GAI and the reading achievement tests - that's just what I was wondering. Of course, the fact that she ceilinged out on all of the GAI tests, the fact that her working memory test also yielded a high number (and thus could be helping her as well), and the fact that developmental milestones related to speaking (though not as much to reading) also indicate that VCI / GAI may be an underestimate puts a little more strain on the difference between possible potential and achievement. Not to mention, believing that there's only a 19/20 of 9/10 chance that the difference is indicating a problem, isn't super reassuring to a parent, even if it's scientifically reasonable to draw a cutof at that point. Especially because people say that vision therapy done younger is better, I feel a bit nervous about trying to figure out if vision problems are having an effect, so I can decide whether to try to do something about it.

Some other issues that I didn't mention before: (1) She's used to have some trouble reading aloud - had to backtrack a lot - she has asked to read aloud to me a lot during the last couple of years (used to hate doing so before that time), so maybe she's been doing self therapy. Over time, she's gotten much better, but occasionally still has the trouble when tired, it seems. OTOH, is it more than most kids? I really have no idea. She was reading books aimed at adults to me often. (2) Her handwriting is sporadically fairly messy. She especially seems to have trouble with spacing words, and sometimes with consistent letter size. When she spends a lot of time on it, it's better (though not beautiful), but that takes time, concentration, effort. How will this affect SAT essay, AP exams later? How does it affect her ability and willingness to write now, while she's still on the cusp of learning to type well (22 WPM now - we keep working on it, because that saved me and DD#1)? (3) Difficulty with writing things sometimes, both her own fiction ideas for pleasure, and her non-fiction writing at school. She says she feels frustrated that she has stories and ideas and "worlds" in her head that she can't get down. Much better this last year, though. The way I think of it is this: maybe her executive function is just average for her age (and handwriting even weaker), but her ideas - she is extremely creative, as well as verbally gifted - are very big. And she has a whole childhood of reading long, complicated, often excellent books. When you're 8 or 11, comparing yourself with J.K. Rowling is really harsh! And even short stories that kids read are usually 5,000 or more words - that's a lot for an elementary school age kid, esp one with handwriting problems, to keep track of, quickly, and yet that's her idea of a short story. So it's like she has a really big toy close of 500 toys, and she's pulled them all out, and now she feels overwhelmed about cleaning them up. She might not have weak executive function - any kid would feel overwhelmed at organizing 500 toys. But most kids don't have 500 toys, so they don't feel overwhelmed as often.... (4) She has headaches occasionally. Also nausea. (I have pretty severe motion sensitivity, and we are now thinking it's possible that I've had mild vestibular migraines my whole life, though that's far from certain.)

I do think she may be reading too quickly to get the details. And so long as that's just a habit that can be corrected, as we start to have her take practice standardized tests where the picky details are the whole point - DD#1 did Duke TIP summer classes and DD#2 really wants to qualify and go to the summer classes, so I'll probably have her take a couple of practice SATs, or the equivalent broken down into pieces, in 7th grade, before the real thing, to make sure that she understands that the picky details DO matter and has practice focusing on them - that's not a problem. Assuming that that is really the only issue.

I took a look at her eyes the other day. They do move horizontally while reading, but I have no way to judge whether it's a normal amount, or a normal pattern, or not. Presumably the optometrist will be much more skilled. No one has specifically mentioned convergence issues yet. Just the tight eye muscles thing that the optometrist mentioned, and the "mild visual tracking" issue that the OT in 3rd grade screening mentioned.

Platypus - thank you for your response. Super interesting about your DD's farsightedness Rx and glasses use. I will probably write more tomorrow, or soon, when I've had a chance to think more about your post.