Hi,

I have written here before about my son who appears to be both gifted with LD issues or alternatively an underachiever for an undiagnosed reason. He is now 9 yrs 8 months. At 8 yrs 5 mths he was tested on the WISC and a full scale IQ was not reported due to the huge discrepancy between working memory/processing speed and verbal/performance indices, in particular -
Working Memory 44th percentile
Processing Speed 75th percentile
Verbal Indice 98th percentile
Performance Index 99th percentile.
His GAI was reported from memory at 142 or 144. At the same time a WIAT was done in which he came up substantially lower in all areas. The lowest was spelling at the 14th percentile. The highest was maths, but even that was only average at 55th percentile. His reading was tested and showed -
Reading Fluency - 8 yrs 2 mths
Reading Comprehension 8 yrs 1 mth
At this time, the psych thought he was either a strong visual spatial learner or was potentially gifted dyslexic. He certainly shows dyslexic tendencies in his writing which is his worst area.
Fast forward to now - at 9 years 8months - where he is tested for his reading again (same test but administered by experienced special needs teacher) and his spelling. The following were the results-
Spelling - 44th percentile
Reading Fluency - 8 yrs
Reading Accuracy - 8 yrs 9 months (not sure why reading accuracy not reported first time)
Reading Comprehension - 12 years 7 months.
Obviously I am happy about this positive news re his comprehension. I guess what I was wondering is whether anyone has seen such a leap in a reading comprehension score (with no leap in other areas!!) with someone with his profile (ie. possibly dyslexic)? If so, how you have helped such a child to continue improving achievement. The also tester told me that he was still scoring at a very high level in reading comprehension (and she expects could have gone further) but she could not test this further as had reached the stop point on reading accuracy. She also said that he answered the questions very quickly and confidently and had little trouble with that part of the test. One further thing he has mentioned to me is that he cannot read properly (silently) when there is any noise at all around him. He tells me he cannot concentrate and understand the text if there is other noise - even slightest.
If anyone has any comments/suggestions at all, I would really appreciate it.
Thanks
Tiz