Thanks all for responding; guess I left out some stuff because I didn't want to completely hog this good thread.
Ds8, 3rd grade, has been tested by school for the gifted programs available - first w/K-BIT, did very well in language arts and above average in math but not qualifying in math.
Now this year for the 4th grade + program, he's taken a Cogat & Naglieri.
We will get copies of these, perhaps some of this will answer my question - is this slowness anything to worry about, and is he gifted in this area but it's holding him back - but I am not sure they look at speed on any part in particular. That is, do those tests try to tease that out as compared with aptitude.
On one hand, I am not too concerned about it since it mainly manifests itself in what looks like an avoidance strategy.
But then again, arithmetic math facts just about killed his interest in math. The timed sheets were extremely discouraging. I don't think he got past the 3's. He doesn't mind bigger numbers, he is fine with them, he hates to practice just for the sake of getting faster so this definitely contributes to slow performance. But also there might be some perfectionist thing going on.
He is having an ok time with Timez Attack software for learning times tables - tolerating it at least.
The other test he took was the 3rd grade SCAT - he did well in verbal, ok in math - but said he was stuck on the last question in each unit. I don't know for sure but it sort of sounded like he just got stuck on something and didn't go any further.
I know he likes tests like that for fun, so I asked which part he liked better. He said Math. I recently asked him again why he liked that part better and he said because it was harder. Maybe it was giving him lots of things to think about which he'd not seen before and it slowed him down. Again, few clues here, but in addition to being a puzzle whiz even when very young and showing other signs of thinking/learning visually, comments like this make me wonder if he's getting what would be best for him in math curriculum.
If I do anything I will wait until after I see the Cogat and Naglieri results, hopefully that will help me see if anything further is needed.
Kriston, I think ds is a lot like your ds, not in level of giftedness, but in many of the things you described about how he gets along. And Dottie's daughter too...we have been to the doctor many times to have his hearing checked. He did have lots of ear infections when small, the ENT doctor said he had ok structure, so no treatment recommendations, but we never went so far as to analyze if he had any processing issues. I really only vaguely know what that means and have less idea of what would cause something like that.
He is pretty quick to pick up on things, the slowness is on the output side, timing things makes it worse.
Preschool teachers asked about his hearing and I myself have wondered about his ability to hear through other noisy goings-on. Also he was hard to understand in early years - not to me, he sounded ok, but others would remark. I chalked this up to his large size throwing people off on his actual age.
I am going to re-read Dottie's posts about specifics on testing hearing ability from the processing perspective, and consider Jool's comment about further cognitive testing, and also take a look at the WISC v. SB-V some more.
Thanks all, and sorry for the length! I even cut some stuff out.
