I have a first time poster on my forum who is asking for info to help her with advocacy. Her son has a very significant gap between performance and verbal skills. If anyone has helpful comments or ideas, please drop in and post.
http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=354384#Post354384

Please let me know what you find out. I suspect that my daughter would have a split, too, although she's never been formally tested. She was given the NNAT as a screener for the school's gifted program, and she scored in the average range. She's weak on visual/spatial, but she's highly verbal. I've been debating whether to have her privately tested or to wait for her spring OLSAT scores.

I posted on the other forum, but wanted to put in my 2 cents here, too. I don't see the low end scores being a disability, if they were average for the age range. I see that as asynchronous development. I once saw a post from Dr. Ruf on another forum on a similar topic. She pointed out that while some of the child's scores were two to three standard deviations above the norm, the others were less than one deviation from the norm which, as she said, "is normal".

The poster on the other forum doesn't say where the scores fell, jsut that there is this wide spread. I think perhaps this is a child who is amazingly advanced in some areas at the age of 7 and then pretty typical in others, for a 7 y/o. The frustrating part of asynchronous development is that the child who is 7 and writes at or slightly below age level cannot possibly produce written work that is anything like what is going on in his mind, which THINKS like a 16 y/o. No wonder the kid is frustrated!!! He isn't disabled - except by the fact that no one will recognize his strengths!!

I don't know the details of what the scores really were. Perhaps there truly is an issue that warrants intervention in the sense of some skills being significantly impaired (IE: below age level and/or not advancing). But it seems to me that this is just a case of let's help this amazing kid until his writing skills catch up.

As the psychologist said to us when we had our 5 y/o tested and were worried about behaviors. "He's just acting like a 5 year old. That's perfectly normal. You just don't expect him to ACT like a 5 year old because he doesn't TALK like a 5 year old. But trust me, he's normal!"

Is it possible that the child just found one section of the test really dull? I have seen that with DS, where he will do better on something with the right amount of challenge and then check out for the easy stuff, so there looks like a big difference even if there isn't.

But if the difference is real, then it seems like it would cause a problem even if the lower score is in the normal range. I think DH has something like this going on and you can almost see how one part of the brain can't keep up witht he other adn he gets so frustrated. We've joked that it's like putting a jet engine on a Toyota. Both the jet engine and the Toyota are just fine in the right context, but they are going to have some trouble working together.