There is a characteristic pattern of results in neuropsychological assessments that is very often seen with children with more complex neurodevelopmental problems that strongly corresponds with difficulties in terms of classroom functioning. In particular, it is something that otherwise able children with ASD and/or ADHD-like characteristics seem to display quite frequently - whether or not they meet the diagnostic criteria for those disorders. Here, by able we just mean not showing evident problems in core cognitive areas.
The most significant relative deficit is often seen on the Coding subtest of the WISC (and/or Symbol Search). This is a test of rapid scanning and processing of visual information combined with simple notation to provide a response. It quite closely mirrors what is required of children when working in a classroom using sources of information located in different places - which could be a text book, a workbook and the board - that they have to move their eyes between.
Children with the Coding deficit often find it difficult to scan between these different places and quickly find where they were looking last. This significantly slows down their general rate of working and can make any subject very frustrating because they are unable to utilise their thinking skills until they have processed the necessary information.
Next, there are also often relative deficits in some aspect of Verbal Working Memory and Motor Co-ordination and/or Visual-Motor Integration (with associated slow/poor handwriting). This means that children will find it difficult to hold information in mind or note it down - so they will quickly reach a high level of cognitive stress and then cognitive overload (at which point they will at least disengage and may protest more actively). It must also be remembered that these children will often have sensory hypersensitivity and specific deficits in word reading and/or spelling - such that there are additional barriers to classroom performance.
Overall, what is seen is a significant mismatch between analytical ability (i.e. the ability to solve problems) and the level of functioning in the classroom. Classroom activity often involves some combination of listening, reading and writing - and when they are put together there are, say, six or seven different core cognitive processes happening at once (and lots more peripheral ones). If those processes cannot be co-ordinated into a structured sequence in real time, the whole thing breaks down and the child stops engaging.
The rapid sequencing of different sorts of information is integral to most academic and classroom activities. Here, information is intended to mean things that the brain is processing rather than information in the sense of facts. Even the process of just writing from ideas in one's head involves something like turning semantics (i.e. concepts or meaning) into words into phonemes (speech sounds) into grapheme representations into motor signals into graphemes (i.e. letter formations) on the page. Listening or reading adds a number of new steps to that process as the information has to be decoded or input first - which can test various other systems, like verbal working memory.
The business of writing is clearly not, therefore, just a question of fine motor control. It depends on things like what the overall task is and where the information is coming from. In fact, there is probably only one small area of the brain that is highly specialised for handwriting - whereas there is a network of 12 areas that are important in handwriting overall. This is why there is little evidence for something that might be called dysgraphia - and very few people who have a pure handwriting deficit. In general, the problems that people have with handwriting are a result of one or more issues in brain functions that relate to motor or linguistic processes - or the co-ordination of those systems.
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