Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Daughter Dislikes School - WISC-V and WIAT-III

My daughter, L, is 9. She underwent ability and achievement testing, and I would appreciate feedback on the results.

I suspect L is Autistic with ADHD. She is incredibly creative, social and original. She loves to build, make and invent. She enjoys writing, drawing, sculpting, programming, cooking, etc. She prefers to make her own designs, rather than following instructions. She is really interested in biographies, but other than that, she does not usually enjoy learning non-fiction facts, e.g. about Science or History. She loves novelty and adventure, and is usually in motion. When she gets an idea for a project she is unstoppable.

She constantly seeks high stimulation, especially tactile, visual, auditory and vestibular. She is very sensitive to taste and smell. When she was younger, she was very avoidant of noise and touch.

Up until about 18 months old, sign language was L's primary means of communication. She knew hundreds of signs. Once she started primarily talking, it was very difficult to understand her words. Even at age 3, it was still difficult for strangers to understand her. I could understand her well the whole time, and was almost always with her because she had severe separation anxiety. She learned words very quickly, both signed and spoken, often after seeing/hearing them just 1-2 times.

She is in grade 4 at a French Immersion school. When she entered the school in Kindergarten, she learned French amazingly quickly. Her principal and teacher said she was an outlier, and the principal said she thought L is "at least highly gifted," verbally.

Her fine motor skills are not naturally strong, but because she has so much practice writing and drawing, she can make her writing look typical for her age when she concentrates.

L wanted to learn how to write when she was 3, and did so by asking us to tell her which letters to write to print words. She very quickly learned how to print all of the letters, and learned their sounds. She could spell a lot of words, and spelled others phonetically. She could read words, but did not choose to read books. Between 3-5 she wrote a lot, including several picture books with a lot of text. During these years she would read words here and there, but would almost never choose to read a book. She eventually started reading books when she was almost 6. She prefers books with lots of pictures, especially graphic novels. She has only recently started to read books without pictures. For leisure, she chooses to read English books that are slightly below her grade level. She reads for fun every day now.

Ever since she was about 2 years old, she has disliked listening to books read aloud by others. She says she finds it boring. Before that age, being read to was one of her favorite activities.

I was suprised at how difficult it was for L learn to read in both English and French, after she'd been writing for so many years, and was very strong orally in both languages. When reading aloud in English, she would skip words and guess words based on their first letter. Then a year later, when we started working on home reading in French, I was surprised to see her go through the same long phase. She still doesn't sound completely fluent when she reads aloud, even at grade level.

One possible explanation for her choice to not read much in earlier years is that a developmental optometrist found that she had mild convergence insufficiency when she was 6, that I assume was worse when she was younger. The reading headaches that prompted our visit disappeared soon after, without us doing the vision therapy that was offered, but not recommended. At a recent optometrist appointment, her convergence was still not great, but the optometrist was not concerned.

She has very strong Mathematical reasoning ability. She is not very eager to learn new Math, but she deeply understands the Math she knows. She comes up with creative ways to solve Math problems. She would rather solve a type of Math problem she's never seen before than a type she has, and she's amazingly adept at doing so, which is a skill that's rare even among Math majors in University.

She enjoys academic activities that involve creating or inventing. For example, she enjoys making presentations, writing, doing art and setting Math problems for other people. She doesn't enjoy listening to lectures, reading to learn information or doing worksheets. Most of her school day is filled with non-creative activities, so she finds most of her day at school boring. She has the option to homeschool, but she chooses to attend school because she craves social interaction. We use her gifted IEP to remove some of her most painful points during the school day. The biggest accommodation is that she can test out of lectures and worksheets for Math units, and work on her own projects. But she still finds most of the day tedious.

She is not careful during activities, whether or not she is interested in the activity. On every Math test she gets several questions wrong due to misreading questions and not being careful with tedious tasks like counting vertices or adding large numbers. But she also is not careful when working on projects she's really interested in at home. Her attitude has changed a lot since she was 4-5, and had very high expectations for her art and crafts that were out of reach for even the most skilled kids her age. Back then, she seemed to struggle with perfectionism, but it appears to me that her attitude is now the opposite.

Here are the scores from the assessment:
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The Psychologist, P, wrote in the report that L complained a lot about being bored during the assessments, especially during the WIAT. I asked him what he thought L means by "bored", since we hear her say that word so often. He said he thinks it means the task is unpleasant to perform. He thinks some output tasks are challenging because of her relative weakness in CPI, but not challenging intellectually, and repetition of those tasks is frustrating. He also said that he agrees that the WIAT is boring.

P commented that L didn't follow instructions in the Essay Composition subtest, and that it's not uncommon for her age.

I asked P about L's answers during the Comprehension subtest on the WISC because I read on these forums that sometimes Autistic students perform poorly on it, but L did well. He said that the pattern of questions she got wrong could be consistent with a hypothesis that she's Autistic because she did not perform as well on questions where social understanding is necessary.

P also mentioned that he thought that sometimes during the administration of the WIAT, L had a thought that was difficult for her to express orally or in writing. This isn't something I've noticed, but my verbal interaction with her is mostly during conversation.

I would appreciate any insights into what the assessment results say about L's learning profile.

I also have a few specific questions:
- Her Vocabulary subtest score is lower than I would expect based on how quickly she learned French and English vocabulary. It seems likely that it is low because she doesn't read or listen to above-grade-level books. Are there any other possible contributing factors that seem likely, given her profile?
- Is it surprising that her listening comprehension and reading comprehension scores are around a standard deviation below her VCI? Whether or not it's statistically surprising, it's surprising to me that her comprehension is only in the high average range. What can cause comprehension difficulties? Is ADHD a possible cause? Is it possible that lower comprehension explains why she doesn't like to read or listen to long books?
- Is her performance on the Sentence Repetition task, on which she scored in the 53rd percentile, surprising, given her cognitive profile? How correlated are Sentence Repetition scores to Digit Span Forward?
- My biggest concern is that L dislikes going to school. It's clear that part of the problem is the mismatch between her ability and the pace of learning. I think another issue is the mismatch between her preference for creative activities and the types of activities assigned in school. But is there anything in her scores that suggests that her dislike of school may be partially based on cognitive or physical struggles?

Thank you.