His biggest weaknesses are verbal expression, fine motor skills and neatness/organization.
Sometimes I am also irritated at the lack of space that is available for him to solve problems on daily work/tests, but that is something that he will continue to experience and needs to learn how to deal with. [/quote[
I doubt it is dyslexia due to his excellent spelling ability. His fine motor and gross motor abilities are well below average.
What you've written sounds like it *could* be dysgraphia - it might not be, but the observations you've made might fit. FWIW, dysgraphia and dyslexia, while they aren't the same challenge, do sometimes co-occur in the same family.
The handwriting doesn't seem to be as much of an issue with text, writing numbers correctly and lining things up seems to be more of an issue.
The issue with lining thing up could be dysgraphia. There are also dysgraphics who write legibly, but handwriting is still an issue because of the effort required to produce it. If you haven't ever timed his handwriting it might be worth doing just to see whether or not he's writing at a pace that's similar to his grade level peers. One easy way to do this is to ask him to write the alphabe, upper and lower case for each letter, and time him. Calculate his rate in letters/minute and then google "letters per minute + grade 7" (or whatever grade he's in) - you'll find reference ranges to compare.
He also spaces out sometimes, but it also capable of being engrossed in a task if it's interesting to him.
My ds seemed to do this to (still does sometimes) - the spacing out happened when he couldn't do the task he was faced with. The cause and effect relationship isn't obvious at all with kids who have an LD. I'd start paying close attention to the tasks that he seems to space out during - if you look closely over a period of time you might notice commonalities that will give you insight into what's really going on. For instance, when my ds was in elementary school he could write sometimes and would stare off into space when he was supposed to be writing at other times. When we looked into the actual assignments, he was able to write when asked a question that could be answered with factual information, but he was completely stumped by open-ended questions.
[quote]His writing ability is also good, he scored in the advanced range on his most recent state testing.
FWIW, my ds is severely dysgraphic and has an expressive language disorder. When he was in elementary school he could not answer an open-ended question or write a paragraph independently if his life depended on it. Yet he was still able to score in the advanced range on state writing testing. The key with understanding any type of test results is seeing what type of questions are asked and what type of response is required - our state testing focused on grammar and understanding context from reading. Those were two things my ds does very well with. There was an essay portion of the exam, but it was such a small part of the scoring that a total flop on it could still land a kid as "advanced" if they did well on the other categories.
I feel like his verbal expression is significantly worse than that, but of course that is not something that is tested.
While they aren't routinely tested as part of classwork or state testing, if you have concerns you can request an evaluation by the school (or seek private testing. With concerns about verbal expression you might want to request that he be evaluated by an SLP and also request the TOWL (Test of Written Language). One thing that I didn't realize when my ds was young was that SLPs don't only work with people who have difficulty with pronunciation/etc, they also work with people who have difficulty with expressive language.
He's in a gifted magnet program, and it is obvious to me that the other kids are far better at expressing themselves than he is. I haven't been too worried about it as he does grow in that area every year.
Growth every year is good, and students with LDs will often still grow academically even if their challenge isn't recognized, accommodated, or remediated. The downside to moving forward without a thorough understanding is that the growth the student experiences is limited, and they may also become very frustrated, particularly if they feel that the peers around them aren't struggling with the same issue or are progressing further. The other difficulty that will potentially come up with expressive language challenges is peer-related - as our kids move on through middle school and into high school, expressive language challenges can evolve into social skills challenges.
I don't feel like anything I've mentioned fits enough diagnostic criteria for anything I'm aware of.
As parents we know our child better than anyone else, but we simply don't have all the answers. There's no reason to expect that you'd be able to figure out a diagnosis by looking at symptoms on your own. What you can do is gather all the data you can, previous testing, homework, classwork, your observations of struggles (where, what), developmental history - and take all of those, plus your ds, to either a private neuropsych or request an eval through the school. The professionals will have an opinion re diagnosis (or not) after they've had a chance to review all the data and observe your ds through testing.
Best wishes,
polarbear
