Dr. Sylvia Rimm is a child psychologist, clinical professor at Case University School of Medicine, author, newspaper and magazine columnist, and radio/TV personality. Her advice column appears  regularly in 2e Newsletter. You can visit her website at  www.sylviarimm.com.

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I teach a gifted student who works very slowly. I’ve taken into account that she’s a perfectionist and strong-willed. However, I read in your book Why Bright Kids Get Poor Grades and What You Can Do About It that a student who, in the face of motivating rewards, still is disorganized and works slowly may be masking a disability. I also read your article which mentioned the three most common disabilities: dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. This student is ten years old and reads at the 11th grade level. However, even though she writes well, she cannot finish writing assignments on time; it seems to take her forever to complete one writing assignment. She also works very slowly in math. Her IQ at age six was 131. However, she was reevaluated last year at age nine, and her IQ was shown to be 118. On a Processing Speed subtest, she scored 8, placing her in the 25th percentile.

Our school psychologist assures me that she won’t qualify for a disability, and that the school won’t test her to try to find out if she has one. How I might be able to help this underachiever?

A

You’ve uncovered an important issue for your student. It’s very possible that she has a writing disability that I refer facetiously to as “pencil anxiety.” It’s a problem related to handwriting rather than written expression, but quickly interferes with children’s abilities to express themselves in writing because the physical art of writing becomes so laborious. While the problem may also be related to small muscle coordination, it’s typically only the small muscle coordination that affects handwriting and has little to do with keyboarding or other coordination tasks. I find this problem very common in boys, but occasionally girls, too, exhibit the problem.

The difference in your student’s two IQ scores may, in part, be related to using two different tests. Earlier Wechsler tests didn’t weigh processing speed as heavily as the newer version of the test does. Thus, many gifted children with processing speed problems have lower scores on this new test, although they aren’t less intelligent than they were.

While it’s possible that your student does have a disability that your detective work has identified, I’ll have to leave it to other professionals to help you corroborate that. In the meantime, I suggest that the student be allowed to use the computer as much as possible for writing assignments, that she tell her stories on a recorder to get her ideas out so they won’t be stopped by her slow speed, and that you allow her extra time to complete her writing. There are some exercises I suggest in my book Why Bright Kids Get Poor Grades that I call “speeding” that may also be helpful to this student.