Thanks for all of the replies. I was a bit swamped today so I'm just getting a chance to go through them more thoroughly. This turned out to be digging deeper than I had originally intended but it is hugely appreciated to be able to tap into the pool of knowledge.
Irena - I can only imagine what my kids would say with a picture of an iron - although there might be some hope since we've started using it for those melting beads crafts
They do know how to use a rotary phone thanks to a recent trip to a museum.
On the question of picture concepts tracking with other subtests in general: my experience is that, in some children, it doesn't track with the other perceptual reasoning tasks, but instead tracks with the verbal comprehension tasks
Interesting. In his case the lowest of the VCI's subtests was 95th%tile so out of the 6 subtests in VCI/PRI it really stands out as the only one below 95 (and at 50 it really stands out).
It is a more concrete task than the others, which can be beneficial for students who are more concrete and conventional in their thinking (or understand that kind of thinking well enough to play the game).
Concrete and conventional would not be two words I would use to describe him
Definitely not one to go along and play the game (or if he appears to be it usually turns out that he is playing his own parallel game for his own benefit - it just happens to be similar enough that you don't notice until he veers off).
Good point about the chances of the high ones dropping. It is hard to say how valid the testing was. DS was not cooperative for a lot of it, bounced all over the place, and was a bit extra crazy for the second session (I have no idea what tests or subtests that would have corresponded to though). Then again at the time that was the reason we were there - that was how he often behaved at school (this year has been better). TBH I was shocked he scored well at all - I figured they would tell us we were crazy for asking them to test for giftedness along with the ADHD that the school told us to test for.
Whether or not it's dysgraphia, I think it is important to understand why the PSI score was so low relative to the other scores. Same with the WM scores, but definitely with the PSI.
I don't know that we really know this but the report basically said he likely has a processing speed LD and working memory LD and recommended a lot of accommodations along those lines that he now has in his IEP. She did do the WRAML-2 test to try to get more information on memory functioning but the scores were all over the place and I don't think it really helped clear anything up. We also did Conner's to rule out ADHD. What other tests should I ask for?
Honestly, I'd want to do further testing not for the higher score, but to understand the scores you have. I'm not sure you need to *retest* but might instead need to add in a few additional types of tests to help understand why his PSI scores were so low. They aren't just relatively low, 9th percentile is truly a low score. It's possible it was nothing - maybe he didn't attend to the task or whatever - but you need to know if it *is* something that is impacting the scores because chances are - if it is - it is also going to eventually impact him academically if it's not understood and either remediated or accommodated/etc.
It already impacts him academically. School was pretty much a disaster until we got the IEP half way through grade 1. According to his teacher this year (grade 2) he's been catching up and she no longer uses any of the accommodations and he is "at or above grade level". Of course given his IQ a B should probably not be considered his level but that is a whole other story. Considering a year and a half ago we were talking about the possibility that he might never write though it is huge progress that he is blending in now in the middle of the pack on writing assignments.
At the time of the test it was recommended to do more testing in 1-2 years which is anytime from now until the end of the year. We recently exchanged quite a few emails about his marks and behavior and she recommended to keep in touch and wait for another year unless something comes up. The argument being that the school is already doing everything on the LD side of things (or they should if we push them to follow their IEP again) and unless he were to get over 99.6% it doesn't change things on the gifted side which she said was a slim to none chance. We can use his original test to enter the grade 5 gifted program so we don't need to test again for that purpose.
The report was 14 pages long and had lots of info about accommodating the processing speed and working memory. There was nothing about remediating and a year and a half ago I didn't come up with much via google. We did try c8sciences for a while but DS quickly grew to hate it so we figured it wasn't a battle worth fighting.
Thanks for all of your thoughts and expertise.
