mykids, I have a dd with food allergies, and with a few of her allergens, she experiences a type of "brain fog" that makes it difficult to think as clearly as she normally does for up to 24 hours after she's eaten the food. It's not something that is obvious looking in from the outside, and when she was your ds' age the only way I realized it was happening was that I first read about an adult with the same food allergy (when I was googling for recipes lol)… and the adult explained how her head felt and how her brain functioned when she was exposed to the food. Once my dd was just a few years older than your ds, she was able to share that she definitely had headaches and issues with trying to stay focused after she'd eaten a food she was allergic to - but it wasn't something she understood to communicate to us earlier. The other thing with our dd - we were so focused on dealing with food allergies for so much of her early years that we never realized the impact of environmental allergies. She's allergic to mold and dust, and there are things as subtle as specific rooms at school etc that bother her. Things like that aren't noticeable enough for her to even mention to another person but they can affect her in a way she wouldn't be as fast at making marks on a test liked the WISC processing speed tests require, or thinking as clearly on a working memory type test.
That said, the pattern you've listed for your ds fits the pattern that is sometimes present in 2e children. Has any of the testing that your ds has had been private or is it all through the schools? Where/why the testing was done, and how much follow-up testing was included might be the difference between having a child who's achievement seems low and is puzzling to having a child with an actual diagnosis. Diagnosis isn't a 100% necessary thing to have for school - when a school evaluates a student they are looking at functioning in the academic environment, and accommodations/remediation/etc is tailored to fit the student's needs. That doesn't necessarily require a diagnosis - but to be effective, it certainly requires an understanding of what is at the root of the issue. Private testers, otoh, give diagnoses - but they don't *just* throw out diagnoses willy-nilly, they will see a pattern such as your ds' test scores show, put that together with the observation that your ds appears to be below grade level in achievement in a certain area, and then, based on what that data is suggesting might be going on, follow-up with other tests (or referrals to other professionals) to get to the root of the issue. That digging/further testing doesn't always happen at school, for a number of different reasons. The other thing that can happen at school is that to qualify for services students have to fall below very low minimum bars outlined in school district policy (this isn't a hard and fast rule at all… but it is often used this way in practice). If you have an EG student who is struggling with reading, for instance, they may still be way above the minimum bar for qualifying for services, therefore they are *not* going to come away from a school evaluation with a diagnosis and most likely aren't going to come away from the evaluation with any kind of recommendation for follow-up help (because if they *did* get any of that, the school would be potentially id'ing the child as LD/etc and that would then in turn mean the school needed to qualify them for services). I most likely didn't explain that well, but the flip side of it is, if you have testing done privately, you will typically get recommendations for follow-up testing/remediation/accommodations etc even if your child is functioning at a level that doesn't qualify them for school district services.
Your ds is also at an age where LDs are often first identified, and also at an age/grade where children who are living with an unidentified LD start to struggle more in school because of increased work demands and because NT students may be starting to catch up and surpass 2e kids in the areas the student is challenged in. For some 2e kids it will take longer and challenges will only be understood as they become more of a challenge and as the child becomes more articulate about explaining what is going on. My EG ds was first diagnosed at 9 (end of 2nd grade) but it wasn't a "complete" diagnosis - he has an expressive language disorder that didn't show up on any of the 2nd grade testing because everyone was working with the info they had at hand, and it would take another two years, continued and deepening classroom struggles, and ds maturing to a stage where he started communicating very specifically with us about what he was struggling with. I also have a 2e dd who struggles *tremendously* with reading, but was able to cover it up for her first years of elementary. Once we started to suspect there was an issue, she was tested at school, tested privately, tested privately again, etc. To this day, she does not have any generic recognizable diagnosis - but that hasn't negated the need for years of intensive tutoring and alternative reading programs. She doesn't fit any conventional diagnosis boxes, but she clearly has needed (and benefited from) help with reading.
Basically all of his sub scales on the standardized test scores are either >99.9% or 50% which make for an interesting learning profile to say the least.
I am not sure if you're just referring to tests such as WISC and WJ-III Achievement tests here, but I did want to point something out - my EG ds has similar spreads in his WISC etc… and they also exist in other not-so-frequently mentioned tests, such as the tests that he's received from OTs and SLPs, and the discrepancies were considered as evidence for diagnosing. These types of discrepancies might not mean anything for some kids, but for a child who's got the discrepancy *+* obvious struggles at school, it's worth trying to get to the root of what's up.
Best wishes,
polarbear
