Nice to "see" you again, Isabel!
I am going to first reference my original response to your post several years ago:
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....Trying_to_figure_out_DS5.html#Post241778Many of those points continue to be relevant, if not more so. Especially this:
"If he has spent two [now more like seven] years realizing that his age peers are working on the rudiments of skills that he has already mastered long ago, he may have developed masking behaviors, so that he won't appear different from his peers. This is especially likely in a socially-oriented child. ...If he continues to be in settings where his academic and cognitive abilities are far outside the norm, he will likely continue to experience internal or external pressure to hide his natural curiosity for the sake of fitting social norms."
In terms of the upcoming evaluation, I would echo indigo that an area to consider in addition to cognition would be executive functions. An evaluator whose practice is usually focused on learning challenges should have experience and tools to examine this, either through direct measures or through rating scales completed by you and your child's teachers (and sometimes by the child).
Another spin on the apparent lack of effort or organization, though, is much simpler: there may never have been a need to use either set of skills in school. If a skill has no real-life function or added benefit for someone (child or adult), it might, quite naturally, not be used. As a homeschooling parent, this has been one of the measures by which I determine the appropriate instructional level: the skills should be achievable at a solid level of mastery, but should be just challenging enough to require some work and management, appropriate to their overall developmental context. (E.g., I don't expect a 10-year-old to manage all of their tasks across all subjects, but I do expect a 13-year-old to keep track of tasks spelled out for them with some detail on a schedule--but not necessarily to plan out all the components of an open-ended long-term project.)
IOW, there is a bit of a chicken and egg quality to this: he may not display executive function skills because he has never had any call to use them. But if he does not display them, his educational environment may withhold more challenging instruction from him--the instruction which may very well be the meaningful, naturalistic conditions that he needs to incentivize the exercise and further development of executive functions--thereby inhibiting the development and demonstration of the very skills that appear to be in need of growth.
