Hi Grinity and thank you for responding to my post.
To be honest, I don't think the scores I see are a good reflection of the child I know. He is (and always has been) top of the class in every subject in school, in a very high performing cohort with only one or two children in his year (who are recognised as gifted) exceeding his academic achievements to date. He has a reading age of 5 years above his age and is able to retain a phenomenal amount of facts and information - not just in terms of his AS 'obsessions' or 'specialist subjects' but pretty much across the board. In general he tends to find schoolwork too easy, not at all challenging and often pretty boring as a result.
It has taken two years to get him a diagnosis, as in the UK you really need the school on side and despite us raising concerns almost as soon as he entered the education system, they were reluctant to see his issues. This is common in the UK due to the way Special Educational Needs Support is funded.
He got his formal diagnosis of AS in January this year and they have put in some support to help him with social/non-verbal communication problems, but nothing academically, as they say he is already achieving well, so we shouldn't worry about that.
We are worried though, as we are starting to see him stall in mathematics. He's always been pretty much a natural, getting top marks without having to try - particularly in mental maths, but now the emphasis is on recording his workings and explaining how he got the right answer, he is tending not to even produce any work for marking, as he doesn't even know how to start explaining how he arrived at his conclusion. He just knows the answer - not how he knows the answer - if you see what I mean.
We are also seeing a slide in literacy, as he is expected to have more understanding of different perspectives and emotional aspects of literature. This is of course in line with his AS.
I guess what worries me is that an essentially bright boy is going to end up failing academically, because his strengths lies in his verbal ability, rather than being able to express his knowledge on paper.
His Ed Psych did tell us that in her opinion the problem solving elements seemed to score low compared to what she would have expected for him. She has worked with him on a weekly basis for a whole term and her opinion is that he actually extremely good at problem solving and this is supported by a strong determination to see a problem through to its satisfactory conclusion, no matter how long or how much effort that takes. She was concerned that his visual issues and to some extent processing speed might have skewed the results. She said that one of the tests in particular - I assume it was the block design - may have been affected by his problems with visual tracking.
As I said in my title, I don't for a minute think he is gifted, bright yes, gifted no. I do however think that his disabilities are starting to hinder his strengths and am desperate to help him make the best of the skills/strengths he has to support his weaknesses. Unfortunately, the education system in the UK has no place for children who are primarily verbally skilled and this could lead to him leaving school with very little evidence of his skills.
I ended up at this forum whilst searching for a better understanding of the meaning of his scores and was directed here, by someone on another forum who said there are people who are very skilled at interpreting WISC scores here. I do understand that my son's profile is very different to the other users and that perhaps that might mean that there wouldn't be anyone who would have experience of his type of strengths and weaknesses, but thought it might be worth a try.
Any advice that anyone could offer in terms of how we can help make the most of his strength/s (I suppose that would be verbal skills) and/or mitigate his weaknesses, would be gratefully received, but of course I will totally understand if there's no-one here that can offer such guidance.
Thank again for responding to me.
