Just to back acs, I'd say the same thing: DS7 is HG+ and a DYS kid, but he's very much a kid. He loves riding his bike and playing with Legos and Transformers. He's a sticky mess when he eats a popsicle or an ice cream cone. His writing looks like any other 7yos (hopefully not worse than that, though sometimes I think it's chicken-scratching!). But he's more curious about things other kids just don't even know anything about. He understands things that kids his age aren't even aware of. He needs to learn and the think like other kids need to eat, and that hunger to learn means he has easily jumped several years ahead of where other kids are in school.
Asynchronous development is, indeed, the name for it.
I'd just add that I suspect there's another term for what you're going through that we use around here: gifted denial!
As one of the poster children for GT denial, I can tell you that the more you know, the more you'll realize that not every HG+ child is composing sonnets before they can walk or curing cancer in the basement at age 4 or something nutty like that. Most are just really quick studies and/or have really intense passions. DS7 was into cars. Well, that's common for 2yo boys, right? But not all 2yos memorize the Consumer Reports car edition while they sit on the potty! That was unusual! Not all 2yos then retain and use that knowledge to ID every car they see, make and model, every time they walk through a parking lot or ride in the car. That was unusual!
If you're like me, then probably many of the people you see every day are GT, too--even if you don't realize it!--so that throws off your sense of what ND (normal development) is. After I found out DS7's test scores, I took a good look at his playgroup and realized that at least half the kids were probably MG, and that really messed up my sense of what normal was. The ones who weren't MG were average kids, probably even on the bright side of average--and here I had assumed (in a kindly way, of course) that they were a bit slow! Oops!
It is possible to test a bit high, but I think it's a lot less likely than testing low. Any number of things can make a kid test low, but you need ideal conditions to test high. So if you were to test again, you might get a different number, since any test is just one performance on one day under one specific set of circumstances.
So if you honestly think the scores were in error, you could test again. But I'd bet on a case of good ol' GT denial!
I'd recommend that you hang out here and see what people say. Read about GT kids. If you see your child in what you find, then it should help get you past your GT denial. But it does take time. I speak from personal experience!
