Hi Pemberley,
Here are just a few thoughts for you - not in any order at all!
First, I don't know enough to know whether or not your dd has a math-related disability, but I thought you might like to hear about the experience of an adult who does have a math-related disability. I have an adult friend who has dyscalculia. She's had a wonderful wonderfully happy and successful life. It's not a disability that's as widely understood or widely recognized as dyslexia, but the impact is similar in many ways in a child's life. My friend struggled tremendously with math in school, knew she "wasn't any good at it" and chose a non-math-science related path for her life's journey. During her school years she took a huge hit on self-confidence until she had a teacher in middle school who recognized that she had an actual disability rather than just being lazy or not trying with math. She had to work extra hard in math classes, and she chose not to take any more math in school than she had to. When she describes what dyscalculia is like (for her), she says that she just has no sense of numbers and what they represent. It's hard for me to explain, because I'm a math-geek and it's not something *I* understand. Anyway, I don't know that any of that actually relates to your dd - it sounds like your dd has a good foundation for the conceptual parts of at least some types of math. Your dd is also in a school situation that beats out where my friend was out any day of the week - you're on top of it, and you'll find the answers your dd needs.
I also think that (was it spaghetti who mentioned it?) it's really significant to realize - you're now at this point of the journey because you and your dd have made tremendous progress in understanding and accommodating/remediating her other challenges.
I hadn't seen a Key Math test before, and it looks like a good overall assessment to try to pin down areas of deficits. The test your dd took is a year old now, so I'd agree to let the school test her again.
Re fluency, your dd's computation scores on the Key Math from last spring were near or at grade level, which really don't point to a disability in computation. The fluency portions of the WJ-III are timed, so I'd suspect any results there are influenced by dysgraphia and vision issues. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd trust really any written test results where your dd is having to read the questions herself as 100% reliable for understanding where she's truly at in math ability. My dyslexic dd is very very good at math - it's her strength in academics. Yet I can't tell you how many math worksheets and tests she's totally flubbed due to not understanding and/or mis-reading the question that was asked. She's gotten quite a bit better at not mis-reading questions during the past school year, but up through 4th grade we were constantly helping her with her math homework - not because she had any real issue at all with what the math was, but because she was constantly misunderstanding the problem due to not having read it correctly. My dd with vision issues also runs into this as an issue occasionally, particularly if she's tired - and she's 13 and has had her vision corrected tremendously yet still has eye fatigue and makes visual mistakes when looking at problems quickly that is very much out-of-the-norm for most people.
When looking at the psychologist's diagnosis, I think it would be worthwhile for you to look up what the criteria are for SLD-Math according to the DSM-V, and look at how those criteria fit your dd. If it's weighted heavily on the results of the WJ-III testing, I am not sure I'd consider it something that is necessarily a disability as much as a possibility that there's an LD but the testing you have at this point is subject to misrepresentation due to your dd's other challenges (visual and reading). When our ds was first diagnosed in 2nd grade, his WJ-III test scores were very much influenced by his dysgraphia and DCD, and it wasn't easy to determine what gaps he actually had in math vs what was the other disability... so our neuropsych suggested that if we wanted to understand his WJ-III achievement results without the filter of dysgraphia etc, we could have him tested with an alternate version (she said there are two versions - a version A and version B), and on the version B let him answer verbally rather than in writing. You could possibly do the same with having the questions read to your dd rather than her having to read them.
Really though, I think that re-testing with the Key Math will give you better information. I'd think through how to do that re-testing with removing as many obstacles due to her other LDs as possible.
Last thought - neither my dysgraphic ds or my vision-challenged dd learned to do math facts with any kind of automaticity until they were in middle school. I worried about this with my dysgraphic ds (and I do believe that with a dysgraphic kid, it's quite possibly related to the overall difficulty with developing automaticity of any number of types of tasks)... but when I read and asked around I found that there is a wide range of ages when math facts automaticity develops even in neurotypical children, and that 10-11 years old is within normal. I still catch my vision-challenged dd counting on her fingers and 13 years old, and my dysgraphic ds is never going to be "fast" at math facts, but it hasn't mattered really since he was in pre-algebra. There's a lot of talk in late-elementary about how important it is to have those math facts drilled in so that kids can rattle them off rapidly and not be slowed down once they start middle school and need to be focusing on other math concepts... but the reality (for us) was that once the kids started working in middle-school math... their teachers let *everyone* use a calculator so that no one was bogged down by math calculations.
Just my random thoughts - good luck to you as you try to figure out how to proceed.
polarbear
