My son was recently evaluated with the WISC-V, in our effort to get to the bottom of what seem to be attention and anxiety issues.� He is 10 years old and in 5th grade. After testing, the psychologist says he is likely 2e, based on the discrepancies in his subtest scores. We�re unsure what to make of it just yet, and looking for outside opinions and recommendations from those who may have experience with a similar situation.
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Background: He was an early reader (letters/sounds mastered at 2, words at 3, books at 4, short chapter books at 5). He was put into an accelerated class in second grade based on an average of reading and math test scores (our school uses MAP). He was always uneven though; reading was always in the high 90�s while math has been inconsistent, anywhere from 70's to 90's percentile-wise. We have viewed him as a fantastic reader who was just good enough at math to get him into the high classes. His MAP scores this fall were 242 in reading (99th) and 228 in math (88th).
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We have noticed that he takes a long time to complete homework compared to his friends in the advanced class. He gets frustrated VERY easily when faced with challenge, it makes him extremely uncomfortable. In math, his teachers say he isn�t necessarily slower to understand, but slower to complete work. Most of his math errors are careless, due to missing details/instructions, not reading the entire problem, or not showing work. His teachers also notice that they can�t put him at the back of the class or they lose his attention. They have said he is not defiant, just distracted. At home he lacks focus when something doesn�t interest him, and often doesn�t follow instructions due to distraction. He can read for ages, but that�s where his area of focus ability seems to be. We've wondered for a long time if he has inattentive ADD, but the parent evaluations, and his own self evaluations, were just borderline.
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He did take the OLSAT in 3rd grade.� His overall percentile was 93rd, and nonverbal was 93rd, but we were very surprised that his verbal score was only 87th.
On the WISC-V, his scores were as follows:
Verbal Comprehension 127 96th%
Verbal Expanded Crystallized 130 98th%
Visual Spatial 102 55th%
Fluid Reasoning 106 66th%
Working Memory 115 84th%
Processing Speed 100 50th%
Auditory Working Memory 106 66th%
Cognitive Proficiency 109 73rd%
Nonverbal Ability Index 106 66th%
GAI 116 86th%
FSIQ 116 86th%
We expected to see higher verbal scores than anything else, of course, but you can imagine our surprise when we saw the FSIQ that put him at barely outside the average range, when he�s been placed in advanced classes and the highest ability groups in a fairly large elementary school, and we watched him fluently read entire books as a 4 year old. The psychologist said he underperformed and the gaps make the FSIQ unreliable, but the GAI is exactly the same, so that's a bit confusing. (Supposedly he showed evidence of some attention problems and was also unwilling to even try if a task on WISC appeared a little too difficult, makes me want to shake him since we paid for this out of pocket!)
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The WISC was inconsistent with his relatively good performance on the nonverbal portion of the OLSAT, and the psychologist is not as worried about the verbal/nonverbal gap on WISC because he did well there on the OLSAT and is generally above average in math at school.
However, the inconsistency overall in math, the "flip flopping" on the OLSAT, and the gap between processing speed and verbal scores he thinks point to a general classification as 2e. Gifted level abilities in the verbal area, but all else is brought down by the processing speed "problem" (even though it is average, the gap makes it a problem he says). We do see this in real life, as stated above with the time it takes to get work done at home. His opinion is that a mish-mash of factors are combining to create the second "e", those factors being attention, anxiety, and processing speed challenges.
Does anyone agree or disagree with this interpretation? We are still processing a lot of information, but we're very interested to hear if anyone else has experience with this type of kid, firsthand experience with what kind of things can help with processing speed, whether ADD meds are ever helpful in this situation, etc.
