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I noticed of the tests was given was "WPT" What test is that? What does the acronym stand for?

The biggest writing issue is a complete inability to write anything requiring original thought in class or in finite time. She can copy sentences or write quick notes, possibly slower than average but it happens. She has gotten exactly 80% on every social studies and literature test all year. The last one was sent home because she was not in class that day and I found out they include a long section of multiple choice followed by two writing prompts; I strongly suspect she always gets 100% on the multiple choice and no-words-written on the paragraphs. At home she can create the paragraphs but it takes many hours. I need to sit with her and ask things like "It mentions this character. What do you know about this character? I haven't read the book - why would she do that?" Every time she says something, I tell her to write it down (which she can do well enough). Eventually we get enough to call it a day.

Sometimes I get the impression that it hasn't occurred to her that she needs to say these things out loud/on paper. I think she gets stuck in some sort of loop where she is filtering her expression to only say things that are not obvious, and they all seem obvious to her, so she says nothing at all. A lot of what we have done at home this year to bring her output up is to have her turn in work full of the dumb answers, the absolute lowest possible acceptable answer, because at least she can produce that. Her quality has dropped to about what she was able to produce in 3rd grade, but she can do it now instead of turning in nothing at all.

Reading and writing are both a bit slow and labored. She really prefers me to read fiction to her over reading it herself, though she will read on her own all day long if I don't have time. Her pace feels slow to me, but I know I read fast so I try not to judge her by that. She avoids writing whenever she can get away with it and looks for the fewest-words solution when jotting notes, but she will write them eventually. Handwriting, punctuation, and grammar are fine. Spelling is improving, but she can still spell the same word three different ways in the same paragraph and not notice.

Other things we see at home that might or might not be related are: zero sense of time unless she has set a timer, can't formulate a response to a question when anyone in the room is talking, took a long time to learn to follow a sequence of directions (take off your shoes, put the book in your room, and wash your hands so you can have a snack), has a very hard time making a timely response to a stimulus like speaking on cue in a play or catching a thrown beach ball.

The tester believes her main difficulty is in retrieval speed: it takes her a very long time to call up things that she definitely knows. I'm... not convinced. This is a part of it, for sure, but it doesn't explain all the issues. I think we should do further testing with a 2E specialist; though the existing office has been lovely to work with and is willing to do more, I don't think they have the expertise we need. So right now my wish list for further testing includes phonological processing and SLP specifically applied to an HG kid.

Writing Process Test. Apparently another example of look at a picture, create a written piece. Maybe the TOWL is a story, and WPT is an essay? In either case, she got -0- words without help. Experimentally, the tester then gave her a graphic organizer, prompted her to create the various parts that needed to be written, and even took dictation for her on the TOWL. This brought her writing product into the average range: TOWL Story Composition 50th %ile, WPT Development 60th, WPT Fluency 95th. Of course this is not a normal administration but it does show that she has ideas but is incapable of writing them under the normal conditions.

504 meeting today. The path is begun. I can't actually tell if it went well or not - opinions welcomed.

DH and I brought the educational tester (T) to 'explain the results' and be forceful for us where needed. I opened by saying we saw problems, but didn't really know exactly what they were or how to solve them, and so we had her tested, and T can communicate the results more clearly than we can. She explained the findings in the testing. The school psychologist seemed pretty familiar and happy with what had been done but pointed out that it would be a mistake to count the trouble spots as below average; fluency and processing speed are lower than her sky-high reasoning score but not really a problem in themselves. T pointed out that as soon as any academic task required applying processing speed, the score dropped precipitously. They finally accepted that this was true (but I'm not sure if they just wanted to move on).

Accommodations:

extra time for testing, in a separate room, no problem.

reduction of assignments such as doing only odd math problems or two paragraphs instead of three, got pushback: this is something that has to be negotiated with individual teachers and makes no sense to do here and now for next year, and besides it isn't always possible. Eventually wrangled an agreement to have a standard assignment reduction in place unless the teacher specifies that it doesn't apply to that assignment. They wanted DD to be responsible for asking the teacher what the reduction would be for every assignment individually.

elimination of paragraph-style writing assignments in math class got extreme pushback. We asked for bullet points on any assignment outside of English class that required more than a one-sentence response. They wanted to not modify writing requirements at all until at least 8-10 weeks into the next school year, when we could 'see how it goes and the teachers get to know DD'. We eventually got what we wanted for now, and an agreement to meet again at 4 weeks into the term to tweak the plan.

Clear communication of due dates and ahead-of-time topic warnings for in-class writing assignments: they have a set of teachers in mind that uses the online assignment system particularly well and will try to put her with that group. There aren't any in-class writing tasks where she wouldn't know in advance what the topic was in 7th grade. (Sounds dubious to me.)

They offered an adaptive technology ...review? referral? which they will take care of themselves. It was nice to have something offered without having to ask.

We had it pointed out to us that a kid who can get As and Bs doesn't need accommodations, no matter how much effort it takes to get them. I used my test example above - gets 80% because she knows all the multiple choice but can't write a single word for the free response section - and was accused of wanting them to give her A++ on everything. 80% is fine, right? What are we complaining about?

It is very odd to me that an educational institution is more moved by her having had to give up afterschool drama to put in the extreme effort she does than they were by the total time of the effort (2-4 hours a day, on one project, every day including weekends) or by the fact that she consistently writes zero words in-class.

In hindsight, this looks pretty grim. Do you all agree?

My philosophy is that any step in the right direction is a good meeting. You did make progress today, got accommodations, and got them thinking.

Start collecting evidence now. The social studies tests are great examples. It's not about getting 100%, but about being able to show what she knows. In future meetings, you'll have more evidence and you'll have a more fluent ability to discuss her difficulties. One point to start making is that a kid with school engagement, high grades, and high IQ is on target for honors and AP classes in high school. These are writing intensive classes. The school needs to find a way to start lowering the barrier for her to produce written work now such that she can grow towards that goal.

Have you met with a SLP for an evaluation? Some of what you say hits a language red flag for me. The fluency of developing ideas is something SLPs can address.

geofizz and mon, thank you. Perspective is good.

Today's meeting was certainly better than the one from three years ago when they suggested the main problem was in DD's ability to manage the frustration of not being able to express the ideas she was able to think, which was going to be accommodated by giving her frequent breaks. Probably by carrying dictionaries to the psych's office. Apparently the psych has a stack of dictionaries she distributes to teachers for this purpose and often has a stack of six on her desk by the end of the day. The concept of helping her learn to express these ideas was something they "had neither the resources nor the responsibility to do."

Another vote for an SLP - I need to find out how to get one privately, I don't think going through the school will be worth the hassle for us. It's very good to know that the person looking at DD is working for us and no one else. When we find one, we should probably have DD7 evaluated too. She's in speech at school but it isn't helping much, and she forms her sentences very oddly. Lots of them, but odd. Expressing ideas is, shall we say, not a problem... I doubt they have many challenges in common. I have two children and they are DIFFERENT.

The counselor looked so pitying when she explained that with CC everything is about writing. I realized later the look may have meant "I know you think your kid is good at math, but they just changed the definition of good at math to include paragraph writing and she isn't anymore. I'm sorry."

It sounds to me like there are both initiation and sequencing issues, which are more in the category of executive functioning/planning/organization problems. If she's having difficulty prioritizing thoughts to put in writing, that's an EF issue, too. When you are scaffolding her writing at home, you are being her frontal lobe. I would agree that having an SLP look at her would be good, and maybe a neuropsych, too, for the EF questions.

Multiple spellings is highly unusual in children this age and of this ability, and is a significant clinical finding. Might want to tease out whether that is an EF issue (poor self-monitoring, so that she might actually know the same spelling for a word (correct or incorrect), but doesn't have good "quality control" for what she actually puts down on paper), or poor phonological processing, and hence lack of solid orthographic mapping of sound to phoneme.

I think I have mentioned elsewhere that older and cognitively high functioning kids with underlying phonological processing deficits often do well on the simpler phonological processing tests, and need careful attention to phoneme manipulation (e.g., deletion, reversal) tasks, especially those using nonsense words.

I always had problems with spelling. It just wasn't my thing. No other writing problems other than awkward left handed handwriting.

It was a specific strategy for my to have multiple spellings of the same word as a young kid...the hope that maybe one of the spellings would be correct.

Also I used to change my word choice to a word I could spell.

ok, aeh, that is beginning to make sense. Somehow I always thought EF and ADHD were the same thing but this sounds like the problems she has:
But in addition to the ratings scales I've now filled out three times, she had these tests to check EF this spring. These look like ok scores to me, are they the right tests?

Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System
Trail Making Test
Visual Scanning 13
Number Sequencing 10
Letter Sequencing 13
Number-Letter Switching 13
Motor Speed 11
Color-Word Interference Test
Color Naming 11
Word Reading 11
Inhibition 11
Inhibition/Switching 09

Conners' Continuous Performance Test (no score - is this a test that creates a score?)
"High number of commission errors and atypical detectability but typical response style and did well at shifting response speed...not indicative of attention problems"

As for multiple spellings, until this year she never seemed to know what the real spelling was. Now she seems to know but not have enough attention to notice when she misspells the word (because she's busy writing), and she can't proofread for spelling. I can tell because her handwriting and her spelling go downhill at the same rate when the idea complexity goes up. I'm convinced the phonological processing needs a good hard look in the context of her overall ability, just need to find the right person to do it.

I would consider ADHD to be a subset of EF dysfunction. There are individuals with EF dysfunction who do not meet criteria for ADHD. For instance, having impulsivity but not attentional dysregulation.
Yes. This is a good test for EF. Her scores are none of them truly weak, but think about how they compare to her cognition. Plus, the Conners' CPT (yes, it does generate scores, but they are not in the same format as the ones most people are used to seeing, and they require more clinical interpretation) mainly tells us only that inattention is not a major issue. It doesn't rule out other issues, and even suggests that there might be something going on with regard to inhibition--which lines up with the inhibition/switching score and inhibition score on the DKEFS, which are among her lowest scores.

And this spelling profile is consistent with some vulnerability in self-editing, which is also related to inhibition, on top of weak phonological processing.