Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Processing speed in WISC

BooBoo,
My son has a "borderline" PSI yet scores above the 90 percentile on VCI and PRI. There is over a 50 point spread.

He is much like your son - poor handwriting, fine motor. Took him forever to learn to tie shoes. Still struggles with zippers and buttons.

Various experts have pointed to his visual motor as one reason for the low score. But I can tell you he is VERY slow at almost everything.

I call him my slow and deep thinker.

Now that he is in 8th grade, this is becoming a problem. It is harder for him to keep up with the amount of work - particularly written output. Unfortunately, many in our schools confuse speed with brightness. I fear he will be precluded from honors level classes, because his processing speed and related output will make it difficult to keep up with the amount of work. Yet I know intellectually he can keep up with the content.

BooBoo - also - the comprehension subtest on WISC doesn't measure overall comprehension. It is more of a measure of one's ability to comprehend social norms.

If you want to get a read on how strong his general comprehension skills are, many speech and language tests such as TLC (test of language competence) would be good measures of his verbal comprehension skills. His overall VCI score is another measure of his verbal reasoning skills.

I have found another thread discussed the same issue. http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/82197/1.html . My son said he usually is the last one to turn in school work except math sheets. Friday his teacher wanted him to take some unfinished work home to finish which was the work from a month ago. When he went to afterschool science class (which he enjoyed), he also always the last one to finish building the projects. Except school work, he is not a slow poke like DD6. Besides he has faster reaction than me and DH while playing video games. I think the visual-motor coordination did play a role of poor writing performance but not the major reason. The things he is interested or not are more important for him. Mich, your DS's situation is the reason I am worry about. My son's small problem right now will get bigger when he enters MS. How do you handle this problem?

DS also has difficulty to answer open-ended question. He usually will say he is not sure or cannot decide. His world is like a digital world, only 0 and 1, any ambiguous problem will stuck him for a long time. His social skill is kind of lag behind than average kids. In social situation, he is seldom aware of the environment. Most of the time his mind is preoccupied his own world. Maybe that is why he got low Comprehension score. How much VCI will be affected by language expression ability? His reading ability is 4-5 years ahead of his age but he only got 86% on VCI.