I am currently working with a teen who has a great difficulty with initiating anything from movement to speech to fine motor skills. He has a multitude of diagnosis from autism to ataxia. It took over 3 hours to perform standardized testing with him as he had difficulty initiating each task requested of him. He is such a COOL kid who loves drawing and music. Due to his difficulties he is homeschooled. School was just such a difficult place for him as he just took so much longer to perform tasks than the other children did.

Andrew was adopted in 2000 from Russia...he was 4 years old. (He is now 15 years old.) He had an un-repaired cleft palate, profound hearing impairment, severe malnutrition, profound insomnia of unknown origin, severe sensory dysfunction at time of adoption, along with intestinal infections (parasites and h. pylori). Andrew's had triennial neuropsychological testing, both privately and through the school district routinely since he joined our family in 2000. Through these evaluations, he's been diagnosed with PDD/NOS (pervasive developmental disorder/not otherwise specified), dysgraphia, attachment disorder, institutional autism, gross motor planning impairment, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), severe visual motor deficits, and RAD (reactive attachment disorder), emotional disorder among other things...  

Cognitive psychologists theorize that the faster we are able to process information (or think), the more intelligent we are, and the more readily we can learn and demonstrate what we’ve learned. There are many recent studies that support this view, including this one published in the journal Intelligence. Each individual is born with a certain amount of resources for attending to and processing information. How well a person allocates those resources appears to be a major factor in determining intelligence. Taub et al (2007) demonstrated that Interactive Metronome (IM) training has a significant positive effect on reading achievement (affecting 4 of 5 critical pre-reading skills) in elementary school students. They proposed that IM training was primarily improving “processing [thinking] speed,” which in turn improved the students’ ability to allocate resources for attending and holding information in working memory … all essential for fluent reading. Ben-Shakhar, G. and Sheffer, L. (2001). The relationship between the ability to divide attention and standard  measures of general cognitive abilities. Intelligence, 29: 293-306. Taub. G., McGrew, K.S., and Keith, T.Z. (2007). Improvement in interval timing tracking and effects on reading  achievement. Psychology in the Schools, 44(8), 849-863.