I spoke with the school psychologist who administered the test, and he explained quite a bit, including his assessment that the slow processing speed isn't a concern at DS's age.
As the parent of a child with DCD, I"ll respectfully disagree with the psychologist's statement that processing speed isn't a concern at your DS's age. I would re-word the statement to say that "a challenge related to processing speed isn't as likely to be noticed in 1st grade as it will be in 2nd grade (or whatever grade applies), due to the nature and amount of classwork. *However* - just because parents/teacher/psychologist don't notice it "mattering" at this point in time, doesn't mean that the child who's living with it hasn't already noticed the impact of it. Our ds received his DCD diagnosis from a neuropsychologist at the end of his 2nd grade school year. We didn't go to the neurospych looking for the answer to fine motor challenges, we went to the neuropsych because our ped referred us to the neuropsych when our ds became so severely anxious about school he was having panic attacks and not sleeping at night. The severe anxiety had resulted from having to cope in school with an undiagnosed LD. If everything is going well at school and your ds is happy, then it's probably ok to wait a year - but if there are any signs he's struggling in any way, I'd want to follow up on the possibility that the dip in coding represents something meaningful.
Re: coding and symbol search, DS completed 5 and 8 problems, respectively. All were correct. The psychologist indicated that his score would not have been greatly affected had he completed additional problems. I don't understand how completing additional problems correctly wouldn't have resulted in a considerably higher score.
This sounds odd. It's been years, and our ds' test was the WISC-IV, so I don't know what the coding test looks like specifically on the WISC-V - but fwiw, when our ds was first tested for a gifted program in kindergarten, we were shown the marks he had to make on the coding test, and if I remember correctly there was space to make quite a few marks. I wonder if what the psych's statement meant was that he was assuming with extra time your ds would only have been able to add a very small number of answers, and hence it "wouldn't make a difference" when the slightly improved coding subtest score was averaged.
He suggested that we request a re-test after 12 months, and if the slow processing speed persists, it may be prudent to dig deeper at that time.
Yet if the processing speed is reflecting a challenge, wouldn't it be better to know *now* and give yourself that full extra year - *early* to help your ds learn how to use accommodations and to help remediate where possible? Time is precious in so many ways. If we'd known a full year earlier about our ds' challenges we could have spared him a school year that was beyond frustrating for him. We could have had that extra year to work on his accommodations and learning how to us his technology. At 7 he would have been much more willing to use a laptop in class than he was at 10 when he finally had an IEP in place.
You have one set of indications already that the dip in processing speed might be real - you also see a dip in his Block Design score, which is timed. One other thing you might be able to do is to request a full report from his achievement testing (including subtest scores). If he's taken a test like WJ-III or WIAT, then you might see a discrepancy in scores on timed vs untimed tests. If you see a discrepancy, then that backs up the notion that the dip in WISC processing speed may be related to a real challenge, rather than an external factor such as fatigue when taking the subtest etc.
From my research, it seems that a routine eye exam wouldn't identify these types of issues. Polarbear, from your experiences, is my understanding correct?
No, although some eye drs (including our dr) are now incorporating a brief screen which may show issues with tracking and brief screens to check for double vision and peripheral vision. Although these brief screens aren't as thorough as what a Developmental Optometrist will do in an eval, they would have caught my dd (who had double vision as well as tracking issues). Our eye dr would then have referred her to the DO for the more thorough screening.
Best wishes,
polarbear
