Casey,
That was I on the other thread. My apologies for confusing you with shorth! My intent was to assert that the differences between formal testing and your sense of your son's ability were primarily owing to his youth and the impact of his disabilities on his testing profile, not to suggest that he was not GT.
To clarify my comment: testing in young children is often not terribly stable, because of the (developmentally appropriate) inconsistencies in attention, stamina, motivation, etc. of the very young. In addition, the pace of development is so rapid and idiosyncratic in little ones that six months of typical small-child development can make an enormous difference in where they fall in the norms. The range and timing of healthy development in young children is extremely wide and diverse. Norm-referenced tests compare individuals to snapshots of age-matched populations. They do not typically track the absolute trajectory of individuals, as that is not the function for which they are designed. This means that, in age ranges where development is rapid, and the standard deviation large, scores are not as predictive of future performance.
An example of this would be language. On the average, children whose first word is very early (there are some on this board whose first word occurred in the six or seven-month range) are highly likely to be identified as verbally-gifted later in life. But this doesn't mean that children who wait to speak until over two years old are not verbally-gifted. (Again, poke around old posts on this board, and you will find quite a few late talkers who are verbally gifted.) Nor does it necessarily mean that every early talker will demonstrate verbal gifts. (Though it is more likely than not.)
The test that your DC took was a snapshot, comparing him to his age-mates, also as a snapshot. Your developmental history of your DC is longitudinal, and thus includes a different class of data, such as rate of learning, and his process of complex skill acquisition. When he is a little older (usually around age 9, plus or minus), his testability will likely have improved, as will the stability of normative comparisons.
And FYI, the Simultaneous index has the fluid reasoning (abstract thinking and problem solving, adaptive learning) and visual spatial tasks in it. Sequential, which was significantly weaker, though in the Average range, consists of working memory tasks, often impacted by attention and emotional interference, among other things. Learning includes storage and retrieval tasks (mid/long-term memory). Both Sequential and Learning include skills which often are found to be compromised in children with some kind of learning challenge.
So even given the caveats above about testing in early childhood, the discrepancies in his testing profile, in fact, are entirely consistent with 2e: reasoning is in the GT range, with working memory and retrieval/cognitive efficiency skills significantly weaker, at the Average/High Average boundary. These are not so low that they would be unquestioned concerns, (many GT individuals have significantly lower scores in these areas than in the reasoning areas, without any other evidence of learning disability) but in a child with known disabilities, they are worth keeping in mind as he moves forward.
(Note: I see that you mention his excellent memory. Working memory, as measured on this instrument, reflects short-term memory skills for generally disconnected fragments of information, which is very different from contextualized, meaningful memory. I also referenced a few common interfering factors above, which might also have affected how he performed on the memory tasks.)
