Welcome Researchmamabear - can you let us know what type of dr did the evaluation that included IQ - was it a neuropsych or other? If it was a neuropsych, was there any additional testing of executive functioning or to tease out why the processing speed score was impaired etc? Were there any other things noted about the IQ subtests? Would you mind posting the processing speed subtest scores, or if that's not something you want to do, can you tell us if the processing subtest scores were similar to each other or was there a discrepancy (high vs low)?
It can be so tough to figure out what's going on with our 2e kids - especially because often there can be more than one challenge, and it takes time and observation and testing to unpeel all the layers and truly understand what's up. For a child that has ADHD, for instance, perhaps the low processing speed score is due to simply having trouble focusing while taking the test... otoh... there might be something other than ADHD behind the processing speed low score that you aren't going to recognize while the ADHD is overwhelming the ability to get a good test reading. And there can be so many different reasons that any on specific subtest is low relative to others. For instance, my dd tanked the symbol search subtest on the WISC and didn't do much better on coding. At home, she was hyper, couldn't sit still, and couldn't follow a multiple step direction if her life depended on it. We'd send her to her room with a pair of socks to put in her drawer, and by the time she got up the stairs she'd forget what she was doing. Her drs were all convinced she had ADHD... but the low score on processing speed combined with her neuorpsych's observations during testing clued the neuropsych in to guessing there might be a vision issue.. and there was... but we'd had no clue!
Do you have a copy of the test results from his school's gifted program testing? If you don't, I'd try to get a copy. It's clearly not a valid result - but it may help down the line in advocating to have had a chance to really understand what the test was and why your ds might have done poorly on it - you might have to explain it at another school meeting sometime in the future when advocating to get your ds gifted programming, or you might find your ds is required to take another similar test and understanding what happened the first time might help prepare to make sure it doesn't happen again. This is just one tiny example, but for instance, if he had to fill in bubbles to answer, it's possible he got off-track on the answer sheet. Or if he just didn't care about answering maybe he didn't answer most of the questions. If you know the test, you can also find out information about what that 3rd percentile really means - was it compared to children his age, same grade, higher grade etc.
polarbear
