When my DS, now 8, was in kindergarten his teacher recommended psychometric testing because he was an advanced reader and grasped new concepts quickly. A psychologist ran the WISC IV WIATT II and Neale Analysis of Reading Ability when he was 6. She described his scores on the WISC as "highly unusual".

Scaled Scores:

Similarities 4
Vocabulary 12
Comprehension 8

Block Design 15
Picture Concepts 13
Matrix Reasoning 16

Symbol Search 11
Coding 8

Digit Span 11
Letter-Number Sequencing 12


She commented that he had no concept of "alike or "similar". In the comprehension subtest, when asked why a policeman wore a uniform he answered "so he won't get cold".

She advised that his PRI was in the superior range and that his FSIQ was not a meaningful representation of ability.

She recommended a number of classroom strategies to address his visual learning style, but these have not been consistently applied by different teachers.
DS has always been a very intense child. He doesn't like to attempt anything he can't do perfectly well the first time. He has a very low tolerance to frustration and is easily distracted (usually by a competing visual stimulus).
He has poor social skills. He plays in a group at school, but is never asked over for play dates, and is rarely invited to birthday parties. He managed kindergarten and 1st grade OK,(B's and C's) but in 2nd grade it became obvious that he was having difficulty with written expression. A speech pathology assessment (CELF 4) demonstrated language skills at the higher end of normal. The SP could see that he was having difficulty putting his thoughts on paper and recommended writing scaffolds.
DS is very unhappy at school. He says he hates school and that it is a "waste of his time".

I apologise for this rambling and somewhat directionless post but I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I have an unhappy child and a school that is out of touch with his learning needs. Should I seek further formal diagnosis of LD, look at social skills training, more challenging/stimulating extracurricular activties, another school??
He currently attends a parochial school (we are in Australia). Gifted education here is a bit of a hit and miss affair, and tends to be very much determined at a school level. We don't have IEP's. He currently gets the occasional maths extension class with 4 other children from grades 2 and 3. It's supposed to be 1 hour a week, but this term they've had 2 classes in 6 weeks. He feels that he spends most of the day doing what he finds the most difficult and least enjoyable - writing, and next to no time doing the things he is really good at (and enjoys). Thank you in advance for your insights.

just wanted to give this a bump.
Did your original assessment recommend further testing or give possible diagnoses?

Do you feel that the lower scores on similarities and comprehension make sense, or did they seem unlike your child? The one thought that I had right away was, he was only 5 (I'm guessing?) when he had the WISC - I can see a 5 year old answering the police uniform question that way, and possibly misunderstanding what he was being asked to do on similarities etc.

Also curious - did you receive subtest scores on the CELF? My ds12 has an expressive language disorder - all of his scores on the CELF are above average, but there is a large discrepancy in the percentile between two of the types of subtest, plus the CELF (as I understand it) isn't timed... and the SLP who administered it said on those sections where he had his relatively low scores, it took him literally forever to come up with his answers compared to the parts of the test where he scored much higher. DS' expressive language disorder primarily impacts written expression - he struggles with generating ideas when he has to write.

polarbear

This seems like a perfectly valid answer to the given question to me. If it wasn't the one expected, then that's probably more a reflection on the tester than the testee.

This is a common problem for testing gifted individuals, because they see things differently than expected, and that would be very likely to show up on a subtest for similarities. The test is about relationships, and different objects can be related in several different ways. For instance, given a stack of images of various edible plants, a tester might be looking for them to be grouped into fruits and vegetables... and without any further instructions but "put them into groups that are similar," the gifted child might sort them by color, shape, size, personal tastes (likes/dislikes), parts of plants (root/leaf/stalk/fruit/etc.), and many more. So one could group and orange with a carrot, an orange with an onion, or an orange with a pumpkin, and still be right... just in a different sense.


This behavior sounds typical for a highly-gifted child, especially one who is failing to find any true peers.


My DD7 seemed to be having some difficulty along these lines last year, when she was doing writing assignments. I helped her with a few of them at home, and it seemed REALLY difficult for her at first. Looking back, it seems like she was dealing with a number of complicated issues at the same time, mostly centered around perfectionism. She didn't have the confidence to organize her thoughts, and she was aware her thoughts were working well above her demonstrated spelling and grammatical levels.

After she'd been through the writing process a couple of times, she had more confidence and it seemed to come much easier for her. For the last writing assignment of the year, all I really had to do was help her interpret the somewhat bizarre assignment, and remind her of the requirements whenever her creative process was leading her too far off topic. Otherwise, she asked me to spell maybe three words for her, and she handled the rest. Her result was surprisingly entertaining for such a lame assignment.

This is my son! He spent time last year with the school district speech pathologist because of his expressive/receptive language disorder. She commented that even when given instructions on "how" to answer object relationship questions, he'd only be compliant for a short while and then go off on his own abstract tangent.

I took her concern with a grain of salt. He's highly imaginative and he was bored. It was the classic example of a tester/therapist looking at one part of a big picture and the child's cognition being somewhere else on the picture.

Yes sounds similar to our ds, now 12.
At 8 he was so bored and friendless at school he ended up becoming depressed.
Social skills training did help since 1. it showed him other kids like him so he didn't feel 100% different. and 2. he did begin to understand stuff like how to respond to people to keep a conversation going; things that seem simple to me, but apparently never occurred to him.
A bit of additional counseling was done to help him not get so stressed about school stuff, and he joined scouts to have a regular practice zone for conversing with kids. There are a fair number of kids in scouts who are advanced in general, so it is a good fit for him. In about a year he was feeling better and has been going uphill in terms of number of friends and overall feeling pretty good.
We did finally pull him from school for homeschool because his one gifted class was setting up to become a real disappointment if not actual disaster in 6th grade.
Best of luck, I think a smattering of different approaches to cover several bases seemed to help our ds...

I don't think the similarities scores reflect his abilities. The comprehension score may be accurate. As I understand it, the subtest requires answers to questions about social situations, and I think he had a very poor understanding of social situations at the time of the test. He has improved somewhat in this area, but it may help to explain his poor social skills, at least in part.

The psychologist did not recommend any further evaluation based on his scores,(because his reading, comprehension and spelling were about 18 months ahead) rather she explained that he had a dominant visual-spatial learning style, and that his teachers should be aware of this, along with his relatively weaker auditory skills. I took him to the SLP myself earlier this year because I could see that he was struggling to get his thoughts on paper. His teacher hadn't really noticed until I mentioned it.

Here are the subtest scores (standard score and percentile rank) for the CELF:

Concepts and directions 11 (63%)
Word structure 13 (84%)
Recalling Sentences 10 (50%)
Formulated Sentences 12 (75%)
Word Classes- Receptive 11 (63%)
Word Classes- Expressive 14 (91%)
Word Classes- Total 13 (84%)
Sentence Structure- 13 (84%)
Expressive Vocabulary- 11 (63%)

Receptive Language Score 111 (77%)
Expressive Language Score 110 (75%)
Core Language Score 109 (73%)

The SLP didn't mention anything about the length of time it took him to answer the various subtests, though it would be interesting to know. These scores don't really seem to reflect the difficulty he has with both generating creative thoughts and writing them down. Since using some graphic organisers at school, his teacher tells me that he is improving with information reports, but is still having trouble with creative writing.

She also suggested a program called "Visualising and Verbalising" but we haven't looked at this yet.

Your explanation about the similarities test responses rings true for my DS. Thanks.
I also appreciated you thoughts about confidence and perfectionism, as both of these may be contributing to the writing difficulties.

I'm so pleased to hear that the social skills training helped. Our local university runs a 10 week course, with concurrent parent training, but kids have to be in grade 3 to be eligible. I'm not sure whether to wait until next year or look for an alternative.

My DS has also joined Scouts as I had similar thoughts about practising social skills with a group of kids other than his school group.

I don't suppose there is ever a single solution. I'm meeting with his teacher again in a couple of weeks, so I'm working on a list of things that seems to be working, as well as the things that are really frustrating DS.