Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Help me understand my son's WISC scores

I took my son for a neuropsych evaluation around a month and a half ago. He did receive a diagnosis of ADHD-inattentive with executive function issues. (almost 10, grade 4)

The psychologist doing the testing told me that he was an exceptionally smart child, although the IQ scores she shared with me honestly do not seem all that high (FSIQ of 120 isn't even enough to qualify for our county's TAG program although he is already in it). She also said he was pretty much average and above average in most areas; no real issues aside frmo executive function.

To me the scaled scores on the WISC seem all over the place. He scored one 19 which I have read is excelptionally high, but the next highest score is only 19 and there are a bunch of scores in the 10-12 range. Is this kind of distribution typical of all kids? Of kids with executive function issues? I do recall when she described his relatively low ("average") score on block design asking her if it was the kind of test where when it got challenging, he just gave up and she looked at her notes and said, "yeah, that's probably what happened."

I'll just post the scores and see if anyone has any thoughts.

WISC-IV

similarities 14
vocabulary 16
comprehension 19 (she said he got full points on this one)

block design 10
picture concepts 14
matrix reasoning 11

digit span 13
letter-number sequence 11
arithmetic 14

(I think she said she was surprised the by the low letter-number sequence which she described as essentiall doing a dot-to-dot, so she added arithmetic)

coding 9 (he was very slow and methodical and this was timed)
symbol search 11
cancellation 12

verbal comprehension 138
perceptual reasoning 110
working memory 110
processing speed 100

full scale 121


WISC- IV integrated

digit span forward: 11
spatial span forward: 9

Digit span backward: 14
Spatial span backward: 12

Cancelling Random: 11
Cancellation Structured: 11

Beery test of visual motor integration:

VMI 91 or 27%ile
Visual perception 99 or 47%ile

A bunch of other tests. On something called the Children's memory Scale he scored 6 scaled scores for facial recognition which was his only below average score.

You have a large discrepancy (28 points - nearly 2 SD) between the Verbal Comprehension Index at 138 and Perceptual Reasoning at 110 there, large enough that the FSIQ is almost certainly not a valid measure of his intellectual functioning - which is probably why she said you have a very smart child, even though the FSIQ is not dramatic: she may be using the VCI as the most probable accurate measure of his intellectual functioning. The much lower Perceptual score combined with the low VMI score and the poor facial recognition test really makes me think about the possibility of problems with visual processing.

I don't think these scores are typical at all. I'm suprised that the visual. System isn't being. Looked at more closely with future tests. How is your son with visual tasks such as sports art reading or math. ADHD often has comorbidities.
Best Wishes
Grinity

My son is very bad at telling people apart. He's been in the same classroom with the same kids for 2 years for the most part and still doesn't know all of their names when he sees them in outside contexts.

His handwriting is poor, although I've seen worse and it is improving.

He actually likes to draw and is always making comic books and such, but the comics he draws are pretty rudimentary sketches. (Funny, though!)

sports: best at things like judo, archery. He's pretty good at soccer. No good at all at basketball or baseball -- no interest though.

He really likes to draw and paint.

He's a fantastic reader. His teacher say's he's reading at about a 7th/8th grade reading level. HATES writing anything; keyboarding makes it easier but even so the composition process is very hard for him. If he dictates to me while I type he will produce a lot more.

Math concepts are fine in school. He makes careless computation errors.

The executive function issue is no suprise to me. He started the TAG school in second grade and did well, third grade started having organization and homework handing in issues; everything fell apart in fourth grade. Last summer I started looking at how to help him improve his esecutive functino problems. (I started a thread here asking for ideas!) He had a horrible sense of passage of time; has a hard time switching gears, getting started on soemthing new, moving off of something that has attracted his attention, etc. he's seeing an executive function tutor now which helps a tiny bit.

Your son sounds a lot like my son who has fairly significant vision, visual-motor, and visual processing issues. My son likes Aikido and archery, painting miniatures, drawing, and reading. He hates writing by hand, and keyboards pretty much anything that he needs to be legible.

His score profiles are here.

Thanks guys!

I had never considered my son could have issues with visual processing. I don't even know exactly what that would be.

The psychologist did think that he has difficulty planning, and that that could be affecting his picture concepts, perhaps -- whichever test had him copying diagrams; but he still scored average or high average there.

I guess what has me confused is that 19 score in comprehension. The psychologist really went on a bit about that. She said that that particular subtest was highly correlated with future achievement. I can't remember exactly what she said it measured, but she said that it wasn't influenced so much by background knowledge itself,but the child's ability to make sense of the world, general principles, and to express himself. She said that he hit the cceiling on this test.

She said stuff like "Dinner conversations at your house must be fasicinating", that he had the mind to be a PhD in philosophy, literature, etc; and that she wasn't sure that the TAG center school we have him enrolled at as was enough to keep up with his needs for more exposure and satisfy his need for inquiry.

The thing is, dinner table conversations at our house with him aren't anything special. He doesn't seem all that bright to me, frankly. He can't stay on one topic for long before he just gets bored and checks out. He'll ask a question, but if you try to explain something to him and it doesn't satisfy him immediately, he almost walks away (or at least checks out of the conevrsation). Or he annoys his sister, or blurts out a stupidly annoying fart joke.

On the other hand, over the past years I've had some interesting comments from our friends who talk with him at family parties. Both my husband and I were extremely good students, went to top colleges, and out friends have advanced degrees also from top colleges and went to some of the best schools in the country -- and they have smart kids, too. Twice, this year, my friends have sat and engaged my son in a longish (for him) conversation on some topic and have come to tell me, "You have a very bright son there". I honestly just roll my eyes a bit (inwardly) because I just don't see it myself.

I see him as slightly smarter than the average 4th grader; with very poor work ethic; little empathy for others; a lot of difficulty writing; gives up at the slightest hint of difficulty; explodes when he is frustrated (though that is getting better).

And I can't image what the psychologist thinks I should do with him aside from sending him to the TAG center school. It is already a challenge for him to get decent grades there because of the lack of paying attention to details and handing homework in on time!

2E kids are a great risk for developing "poor work ethic" because there are areas where there is essentially no correlation between their effort and the resulting outcome, and so they may learn fairly quickly that if something is difficult in their area of disability, they might as well give up because it isn't going to work matter how hard they try. If they are very bright, they may rarely encounter anything outside of their area of disability that is difficult. If they are the sort of child who can reason from the specific case to the general, then they may erroneously decide that "difficult" always equals "impossible", and then give up immediately even on tasks where increased effort would help.

Here's some information about difficulty recognizing faces.

http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/prosopagnosia/Prosopagnosia.htm

Agree with Beckee, this:
sounds very much like prosopagnosia (I have it) and if he has it, it may really help him to know that he's different from other people in this regard, and that it has a name, so that he can tell people if he likes and develop strategies to handle it.

The key thing about prosopagnosia is that someone with it doesn't have the sense of familiarity, when they see the face of someone they know, that most people have. It isn't prosopagnosia if you sense that you know someone but can't recall their name. Not recognising people out of context is a classic sign, because if you're expecting to know someone you can use your intelligence to work out who it is, but if there's no reason to think that you'll know this person at all, and you don't have that familiarity signal, you have no reason to perform the "search" for the person's identity. I failed to recognise my DH out of context the other day, although admittedly that surprised me!

Thanks everyone for your ideas!

I don't know that the facial recognition piece is necessarily something I am going to address right now. Does that seem weird? I know recognizing people is very important socially, but my son certainly recognizes his friends outside of school and family members well; that's never been an issue.

As far as classmates go, he is the only child of his race in the class or was for two years anyhow; and I do wonder if that makes things harder. I know that I have really bad memory for faces as well, but I am better at faces that are my own race than members of other races, probably because of better familiarity at distinguishing between salient features.


At any rate, we are struggling so much with homework, organization, writing, handwriting, attention to detail, starting homework, completing homework .... and turning in assignments. I just can't see trying to improve facial recognition right now.

I don't really know why the psych gave him those subtests. What WISC subtests do they correspond to?

It might be because of a specific problem I said my son had one day that led me to seek testing for him.

His math teacher asked him to take 10 2-digit numbers and order them from least to greatest. The numbers were on worksheet and he had to list them in order on a different piece of paper, and he had what seemed to me a great deal of difficulty performing this extremely simple task.

It might be that my expectations of him, though, are very high. And what he is capable of doing in many cases, is just plain average 4th grade work. The integrated subtest scores all caem out in the solid average range I think.

Honeybadger, your son's scores bear a lot of similarity to my D's. She is 16 now, but had MANY of the same characteristics at his age. She has grown out of some, others not so much. She was diagnosed with a non-verbal learning disability (it was mentioned as a possibility when she was in 2nd grade, but we didn't really pin it down until 9th grade). She, too, had a lot of issues with facial recognition.

She still struggles with executive function issues. Just this week she ended up with points off on 3 pre-calc homework assignments because she didn't get them turned in on time. They were done on time, just not with her when she went to class. Then she forgot to deal with it for a couple of days. She also has trouble remembering to put her name on assignments. I think she does her homework twice more often than she admits because she can't find it after it is done. She carries a 3.7 GPA (unweighted, but she does take all the honors classes offered at her high school) -- it would probably be a 3.9 (no hope in French even if she were organized ) if she didn't have the executive function problems.

She also has always had trouble putting her thoughts together on paper. She has fabulous analysis skills (I, too, could see a PhD in literature or philosophy in her future!), and in a verbal class discussion those qualities really come out. But it is hard for her to get it out on paper. She is fine at grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. Just not great at considering her audience and putting together a logical flow in a paper. In fact, we are trying to get her school to allow her to take an online AP Lit & Composition for the rest of this year instead of their normal English class partly because it would be very writing intensive, and that is what she needs the most this year.

In fourth grade, she also was not a sparkling conversationalist at dinner, and not always even intellectually curious when I would expect her to be. She has certainly become more so on both over the years, especially more intellectually curious. She was kind of internally focused for a lot of years, I think. Also, she is NOT a people pleaser (my older kid is, but she is not). So grades are only marginally important to her, and she wants to spend time on her own stuff (reading, biology, studying for Quiz Bowl, Doctor Who ). She does what is needed, but usually not more.

Things that have helped us over the years:
- A high school with block scheduling (so they only juggle 3 or so academic classes per quarter) has been good for D.
- She has gone to an independent, private school with pretty small class sizes. A lot of the teachers are relatively forgiving on organization issues, especially because she has a diagnosed disability.
- Daily paperwork sorting/organizing sessions with both of us involved. We don't do it daily any more, but we did pretty much all the way through ninth grade. Sorry, I am sure you don't want to hear that. But she just couldn't do it. She has gotten somewhat better -- not more organized in keeping things in folders and stuff, but she is more likely to know where she stuffed the paper when she is looking for it later. She asked for a new set of school folders for Xmas (Santa is all over that!).
- She has a laptop (everyone in their high school school does, and they carry it pretty much everywhere). She has started using the calendar function more effectively this year. Sometimes she uses a sort of sticky note function to put a reminder on her computer desktop for things she has to do.
- She has contact with friends from school via email and chat on her computer, and can confirm questions about assignments and due dates with them when necessary. Since she doesn't always write down the info when she should, that is her backup process. I suspect she does this a lot more than I even know about.
- Her slow processing speed in math has improved somewhat over the years. She does have accomodations in math class to have extra time on math tests, and the teacher puts one problem per page on her tests. She has also been granted time and a half from the College Board on SAT/AP tests due to her non-verbal learning disability (because of slow processing speed in math). She is actually very good at math (is considering a career in epidemiology, which requires pretty good math skills), just a little slow.

It is frustrating, but to some extent we have to take our kids as they are. I try to feed her areas of interest, and work with her to shore up her skills to an acceptable level in her areas of weakness. I was a really frustrated parent (especially in middle school) until I accepted that she has a learning disability that affects her executive functioning. Once I accepted that she needs extra support in that area, and we were only going to take babysteps (and sometimes slide backwards), our relationship is better. I'd rather have the solid, loving relationship we have today than a higher GPA with more friction in our relationship.