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Posted By: AlexisHMS I don't know what I'm looking at here... - 10/04/17 08:14 PM
DS 7 recently diagnosed ADHD Inattentive, anxiety and suspected gifted by the neruodevelopmental pediatrician. Has been getting OT and writing help from his IEP based off his old scores. New scores on by the school CST during reeval are on WISC and WJ similarly high in verbal lower elsewhere. Here are scaled scores I will erase at a later date:

WISC -V
SI 10
Comp 16
BD 10
VP 8
MR 2
FW 8
DS 9
PS 14
CD 6
SS 7

WJ-IV
reading fluency 101
Math calculation 85
Letter word Ident 114
Applied Problems 98
Spelling 111
Passage Comp 102
Calculation 94
Writing samples 106
Oral Reading 106
Sentence reading fluency 99
Math Fact Fluency 81

I don't know what this is telling me and haven't met with the CST yet. Is his writing not low enough for help any more? Seems like maybe math is where he's struggling. Clearly stronger in all things verbal but does that explain why people think he's gifted upon meeting him but decide he's not upon testing him? Does ADHD and anxiety have to do with it? The notes said he was calm and tried his best the whole time but distracted by sounds.

Not really sure how to advocate this one....
Any help appreciated
Thanks!

Posted By: aeh Re: I don't know what I'm looking at here... - 10/04/17 10:25 PM
Strictly speaking, his only achievement score below solidly Average is in math fluency, which is at the border of Average and Below Average. All other scores are in the mid-to-high reaches of the Average range, with untimed basic decoding/encoding (reading/spelling) skills among his personal strengths, and the remainder in the middle of the range. (Math calculation is a composite of calculation and math fluency.)

Hard to say what exactly his cognitive results mean, given the Dx and the high degree of variability between subtests within the VCI, FRI, and WMI. One could speculate that his verbal reasoning reaches into the MG range, especially when in familiar, contextualized language, but his actual score, of course, is more high average. His quantitative reasoning skills present as essentially age-appropriate (consistent with his math achievement) while his adaptive reasoning presents as extremely low. This may because he genuinely has challenges with abstraction, shifting, and/or flexible thinking, or it may be because he was impulsive or inattentive on this multiple choice task, or it may be due to some other factor. He did a whole lot better on the visual working memory task than on the auditory task. Was there any indication that there were differences within digit span's three conditions (forward, backward, sequential)? Sometimes that can lead to hypotheses. Picture span also uses concrete-familiar images, which can be easier for some children to encode into short-term memory than meaningless symbols (numbers).

The data are still consistent with OT support (though you would need the OT eval/progress data to say so more definitively). And writing from a physical stand point. IRL, I wouldn't be surprised if he fatigues, or finds it to be too physically burdensome to generate written output, even when he has the language expression skills. Or just gets frustrated with his own pace.
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