One of my kids have a really hard time when he needs to do step by step work. It took him a while to learn to read as he could not understand phonics or breaking the language in chunks but at about second grade he suddenly became a fluent reader and now reading is one of his strongest points. However, this type of learning is indicative of him across the board. Now he is in high school and he is doing in general fine but he gets low scores any time that the teacher requires too much detail or to show all the steps where he might omit steps or put them in the wrong order. The thing he does is he gets the final results and then he tries to go backwards and make up the steps. He was able to do that for a while well and fooled us but now that the classes are getting harder and harder does not always work out. And in math there are problems that he really needs to do the work. Too many steps to jump into the solution ahead (he is not that genius… ha ha). It looks to me like some type of a learning issue but not sure what to do. A lot of the teachers seem confused. I have another kid that is intuitive and has a similar learning style but not this extreme. Any ideas?
This sounds like executive dysfunction. Have you ever had him tested?
He had testing done in elementary school for learning disabilities but all cam back within normal range. Does executive dysfunction affect only academics or life in general? He seems ok otherwise.