Originally Posted by fireball45
She also is very impulsive and has difficulty reading social cues. At this point in her life, she is socially affected much more than academically. Socially, she's struggling. Academically, she's been doing fine, although I'm obviously concerned about latent issues that would cause trouble in the future.

Ah, that would explain the relatively lower Comprehension and Picture Concepts scores (which also happen to be the subtests not on the WASI-II). Comprehension draws largely from non-academic, experiential knowledge, and thus has a lot of overlap with social reasoning. Picture Concepts is also an every-day life kind of task, and requires examinees to make connections between visual images of common objects. The two together suggest that she currently is not as skilled at reading nonverbal cues (largely visual in nature) in social situations, or at the related skill of translating such social information into language. Weaknesses in social perception or social problem-solving are not all that unusual in children with LDs or ADHD (although we usually associate this with ASDs).

I would still be concerned about her academics, as she goes into the next stage, especially with automaticity in spelling and calculating, which sound vulnerable to me, from your description. At some point in the very near future, when all of her classmates have mastered multiplication facts, her lack of fluency will begin to hold her back in her cohort, as problem-solving and multiple manipulations become the rule, rather than simple calculations. Something similar often happens with spelling. Although she is the top in her class, if she continues to make unusual spelling errors, whether due to lack of automaticity, lack of effective spelling strategies (there is only so far you can go with rote memory), or weak self-monitoring (characteristic of ADHD/executive dysfunctions), teachers will begin to judge her on her spelling rather than the content of her writing, or she will begin to self-censor her vocabulary to reduce the chance of spelling errors. Neither is a desirable outcome.

You might consider having additional evaluation in executive functions done. There are children who are not ADHD, because they don't have clinically dysregulated attention, but do have deficits in inhibition (impulsivity). If you do pursue further eval, make sure to mention that impulsivity is a concern as distinct from ADHD.


...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...