First piece of advice - re CogAT - our ds is one of the EG kids who did *not* do well on the CogAT. His scores were way below what he has scored on the WISC and WJ-III Test of Cog Abilities, and he had accommodations of extended time plus verbal answers - from what I understand he just thought a bit too outside the box on most of the questions. Our school district also uses CogAT for GT program screening, but we successfully argued that the CogAT wasn't representative of his ability based. If you're told by the district that the CogAT is a problem for your ds - let us know what other types of testing your ds has had/rough scores etc, and we can try to help you with thinking through how to advocate for your ds. If it was me, I wouldn't ask to retake the CogAT with accommodations - I'm just so leery of the CogAT altogether!
Re the handwriting - my ds has dysgraphia so I'm coming from the perspective of parenting a high IQ child who has a handwriting disability. Some of what you wrote about your son *might* indicate dysgraphia, but it sounds like the OT who's worked with him isn't thinking it's dysgraphia. So the first thing I'd do is google dysgraphia symptoms and see if anything besides what you've written here fits your ds (does he reverse letters, have trouble with capitalization, is spacing oddly squished or spaced out, can he write on the lines or does his writing float etc). Also look for the following when your ds writes: does he sit with odd posture, does he get really close to his paper to look at what he's writing, does he grip his wrist or elbow or hold the arm he writes with, does he have an odd pencil grip, does he look like he's working extra hard at focusing with his eyes as he writes? Things like that. Also ask your ds if his hand gets tired or if his hand starts to hurt when he writes. How long can he write before he starts getting tired? Does he have any problems when he copies? Does he avoid or complain about schoolwork that you think should be easy but involves handwriting? Putting notes about all this together will help you both with thinking through - does he have dysgraphia - plus it will help you in advocating for him at school.
The next thing I'd do is to have your OT put in writing *right now* what your ds' handwriting speed (letters per minute is) and if she will do it, also have her put in writing what she expects a child's handwriting speed to be at the grade level your ds is in and what grade level his current handwriting speed is at.
I would worry less about the mixed messages from teacher/OT at the moment and instead try to get at the root of what is really going on with your ds - is it truly just not trying, is it perfectionism, or does he have some type of challenge with handwriting. You can request an eval through the school, whether or not your ds will ever qualify for school-based OT. You need to be specific in the request - and I don't have time to think through right now the specifics of what you need to be specific about - yikes. How's that for non-advice? Sorry, my brain's a little bit sleepy this morning
Like revmom, my ds had a discrepancy in his Beery VMI test. There were also clues in his ability vs achievement testing that was done first through the neuropsych and later repeated at school. The school psych did *not* give a diagnosis or any kind of interpretation that indicated dysgraphia - our school instead spent a lot of time and effort arguing that there wasn't a problem. I had quite a bit of the same information in the school's testing but they weren't going to point it out - I had to know how to look for it. In our ds' case, his scores on fluency tests were very VERY low compared to his scores on things like comprehension etc. The school just gave us a list of his scores, but when I grouped the various achievement test scores based on which tests required verbal answers, which tests required handwritten answers, and which tests were timed vs untimed, the test scores all fell into very obvious patterns indicating that handwriting was at the root of the difference in scores.
Best wishes,
polarbear
