Thank you for the thoughtful replies!
First of all, you clearly have done an excellent job with him, based on his achievement scores. (In fact, there is peer-reviewed research that finds that homeschooling parents can have as good academic outcomes with ADHD and LD children as master's level special educators.)
Secondly, whether or not he is diagnosable as having ADHD, medication is not the only treatment. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing. That's a decision that I would encourage families to make holistically, taking into consideration the needs and well-being of both your individual child and your family system. It's also not an either-or decision. The majority of psychostimulants are short-acting; I know many students who take them only during school hours, but not at night, on weekends, or during school breaks. If his attentional dysregulation interferes with his major life functions or happiness, then it becomes a problem. Otherwise, it's just one aspect of who he is. He's also still very young. Given opportunities to learn and be reinforced for skills in managing his attention, his brain has time to develop the neurocognitive skills further.
To your original PSI question: attentional dysregulation is most certainly associated with low processing speed. These are minimally-engaging rote tasks, without particular intrinsic meaning. Sustained attention for them can be quite challenging for ADHD-ish kids. With WJ fluency scores no lower than 107, I would not be particularly concerned about LD, as the inattention could easily explain the PSI. Were Coding and Symbol Search about the same?
Got the scores just now!
Similarities 17
Vocabulary 17
Comprehension 15
VCI - 138
Block design 16
Picture concepts 14
Matrix Reasoning 13
PRI - 127
Digit Span 14
Letter-Number sequence 14
WMI - 123
coding 3
Symbol search 9
PSI 78
FSIQ 124
GAI 139
So it looks like working memory was a bomb.
Actually, the index scores are listed after the relevant subtest scores, so working memory is strong, comparable to perceptual reasoning, and not dramatically lower than verbal comp. Processing speed, on the other hand, is most certainly low, and it's so particularly for coding, which is a timed fine-motor copying task. I would be concerned about this, as 3 is in the 1st %ile. Symbol search is not all that bad; at least it's in the average range. The extent of fine-motor demands on symbol search is a tick mark. Really, any mark that is distinguishable from a non-mark will do.
This looks like a fine-motor/visual-motor-integration/motor coordination issue, on the face of it. The poster above (sorry, can't remember off-hand who it was!) who inquired as to the difference between math calculation speed with and without a pencil makes a good point. As several threads have mentioned, attention problems may sometimes reflect motor coordination deficits. In which case, psychostimulant meds would not help. And, of course, sometimes ADHD and DCD are comorbid.
