My son has been reading since the age of 2.5 and also was diagnosed with PDDNOS around the same age. His reading ability was always seen as hyperlexia and not a sign of giftedness despite more or less reasonable reading comprehension, probably because of his dx. His issues included speech delays, fine motor delays, sensory things and social inadequacies.
Well, now he is in the 2nd grade and doing well (lost his dx). They don't have grades yet, but he seems to be doing excellent academically. The whole class was given Cogat at the start of the year and the results just came back. Verbal/Quantitative/Nonverbal - 112/135/125. Composite - 130 (98%ile).
So is it still his hyperlexia or not? By that I mean - is it the fact that he started reading very early that is still affecting his scores like that or this is in fact reliable and an indication of specific giftedness (math)? How do I tell at the age of almost 8? Do hyperlexic kids do well on Cogat in general when they are young? Or WISC tests?
Does it make sense to continue with the gifted assessment (Iowa tests) or let him stay with his class and work on social interactions instead of being pulled into a much smaller group of kids? We have two separate tracks for gifted kids in our SD - math grade acceleration and gifted group, and he was already accepted into the first program, but the second requires more testing because his verbal is just average at this point. What would you recommend?
