Hi, haven't posted in a while, so here is a quick reminder:
DYS age 11, diagnosed ADHD, ASD, TS, and anxiety. FSIQ 144, NVI 158, VCI 118, similarities scores of 11/15/13 at ages 7/9/11 respectively (only the first was obtained during an official administration of the full test by the school, the other two were taken during a study we participated in for autism research.) WIAT math 160, verbal 130's.
Now, on to my actual questions. After learning a bit about what the similarities section of the test seems to be looking for I wasn't really surprised DS did poorly on it when tested the first time. From what I gather it involves categorizing things and thinking about them in certain systematic ways that he has never been good at.
Recently I mentioned this to his BSC and she informally assessed him on a basic "which item does not belong" activity and she said that he performed at about the level she would expect for a 7 year old. As in, there are 4 food items and 3 are veggies and one is not and he doesn't get the obvious answer. He hems and haws for about 5 minutes, talking about which vowels and consonants the names of the items share or do not share, their colors, the quality of their flavors, even debating the exact variety of some of the species of vegetable, which obviously is of no import whatsoever.
My questions are, what does this mean for him educationally and is there anything I can do to work on it specifically? I find myself wondering if the same underlying weakness that is leading him to have so much trouble with such a simple concept is also interfering with his ability to complete his school writing assignments.
He is a wonderful creative writer (this is relatively recent!) and he has great technical writing skill, but he can't seem to write a cohesive, properly structured, logically organized school report style paper. He is going into 6th grade next year and I plan on asking for writing accommodations at the upcoming IEP meeting to have them in place for middle school. I am worried they are going to insist that it is more a matter of lack of effort on his part rather than a lack of ability.
I should mention I have been homeschooling him this year due to covid and the difficulty he was having with distance learning/the hybrid model. He has really grown in his creativity, writing many short stories, poems, and journal entries, as well as finally becoming interested in art, painting and drawing many pictures of his special interest, creating tons of maps of both real and imagined places, and making the most devious mazes ever. He also took up piano about a year and a half ago and has progressed rapidly through the Suzuki method, surprising everyone as he finished book one in under 3 months while in OT still learning how to tie his shoes! He is now super into composing and spends much of his free time writing sheet music. Apparently pulling your kid out of school can really boost their creativity! (and I honestly thought my kid didn't have any :P)
Back to the writing. Working with him first hand I can see that he isn't just being lazy. And I can see that his best efforts are disorganized. The things he chooses to include/the ordering of his thoughts are, to me, completely illogical. He can write a story just fine, with a logical sequence of events, but he can't choose topic sentences and support them with relevant information in a way that would leave readers feeling anything but confusion. He jumps around, includes irrelevant information, barely sticks to the thesis, all the while taking an incomprehensible amount of time to compose even a single sentence.
This all has all lead me to wonder if there is some basic deficit in his underlying way of organizing the world around him. If he doesn't think apple=fruit and instead thinks apple=a word with double consonants this could easily lead to him writing or thinking something that doesn't logically follow for most people. Especially if he makes the assumption that everyone else categorizes apples the same way. We of course make the assumption that the most salient feature of an apple is it's affiliation with fruits in general as well as it being crisp and delicious.
So yeah, am I just trying to force some evidence to fit a theory or is there some truth to the idea that he might have a specific deficit that is affecting a couple of different academic tasks? If so, how do I help him get better at it?
And as an aside, his vocab score has gone down each time he has been tested, should I take this to mean that he is no longer learning new words? It was 16/13/11 at 7,9,11. Is that normal? He reads a lot and we think he has a pretty impressive vocabulary. The study did not provide any additional written material, just the scores, and he was not allowed to take his ADHD meds due to the study criteria. But the 11 really surprised me even taking into account his lack of medication. He did after all still get his usual 19 in digit span every time. I guess that one and figure weights (also 19 all 3 times) must be pretty accurate if they are that stable! He also was stable on symbol search and nearly so on matrix reasoning. Just these verbal measures are all over the place! The study did not do any visual spatial measures, so can't compare there.
And that marks the end of my huge rambling question/life update
