Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment does this make sense?

Dear Mrs. X,
I can definitely get the raw score for you on your child's test. I will need to pull her test and hand score it. I will be out of the office on Monday and Tuesday next week and will try and get back to you by Thursday with that information.

As far as why we use the verbal and nonverbal portions of the test for our program qualification: each year we have an internal committee of administrators, gifted teachers and psychologists review the data from the students we screened to determine if our criteria is appropriate for our programs. Our goal is to not over test students thus having more students not qualify than qualify, but to target the students that will achieve the cognitive scores to enter our programs. In years past, the district used a combined quantitative/nonverbal score with the verbal score. When reviewing this data, the committee found that the combined score was causing an inflation, or heavier weighing, on the rubric in this one area. Also, with all children now taking the MAP starting in kindergarten, we were able to get nationally normed math scores across the district for the first time this year. Since the quantitative part of the test is based on number sense and number concepts, the committee felt the MAP test would provide us with good information on students who were strong in this academic area. Therefore, the decision was made to take out the quantitative portion of the test and use the nonverbal portion weighted equally with the verbal portion. By using the nonverbal only, it also provided more equity for second language learners since the quantitative has a heavy language component in grades 1 and 2. In August, our committee will meet to review this past year's data where we discuss MAP targets for screening as well as cognitive scores. We then post all updates to our webpage for our parents to receive the most up to date information about our testing program for gifted services.

I hope this has been helpful and I will pull your child's test booklet next week for scoring and communicate back with you her raw scores on each of the subtests within the verbal and nonverbal portions of the cognitive test.
Sincerely,
Y Z

Short answer: No.

(jus' sayin')
-Mich.

The school district near ours uses the Raven's test, which is like the NNAT test. Both are only non-verbal tests. They use it since that district has alot of kids for whom English is not their native language. I can understand why a district does that. I would see if this school district would also accept a WISC or some more traditional IQ test.

sounds like they are saying they have programs for 'x' sort of kid, and if your kid scores in the range that makes them look like 'x' sort of kid, they will do well in our program.
this doesn't sound like they are even necessarily trying to find the majority of the high ability kids, and really sounds like they are NOT trying to find the highest ability kids. Is this cogat?

"Since the quantitative part of the test is based on number sense and number concepts, the committee felt the MAP test would provide us with good information on students who were strong in this academic area. Therefore, the decision was made to take out the quantitative portion of the test and use the nonverbal portion weighted equally with the verbal portion."

gets a little dicey there, but are they saying they are now using 2/3 of one test and the map test to cover the 1/3 they dropped?

This is CogAT. They use the MAP to determine who will take it. The kids need to score in the 90th percentile in reading and math (fall scores) to be eligible to take CogAT in January. And yes, they are only using 2/3 of the test. To me, it would seem as verbal would be more of a roadblock to non native speakers not the quantitative section.

If they use MAP to determine who takes the GT screener, they will miss all kinds of kids, like a kid who didn't test well on the particular day of the MAP test, a kid who has not been exposed to higher level materials because they haven't been learning anything new, a kid who is already developed underachieving tendencies. MAP is a great test of what a kid already knows, but it really has little to do with whether you are GT or not. An extremely bright kid who would not test GT on IQ tests could nonetheless do very well through hard work on the MAP. IMO, they should give the CogAT to all the kids. Or at least allow the CogAT to anyone who asks, or accept outside testing that shows the child is GT.

I hope this pastes correctly... They use this matrix

Cognitive Abilities Test

(CogAT)

0 1 2 3 4 5
120-125 126-128 129-134 135-139 140+
Verbal
National Percentile

Nonverbal
National Percentile

The child needs to score 3 points, with at least one point in verbal and 1 point in non verbal

So, if I'm reading her chart right, you'd need to be 126+ in both areas. Our local districts will take 125 in any one area (nonverbal, verbal, or quantitative). Kids who come out around 120+ in any one area are also retested on the OLSAT or the CogAT again at some of the schools in the district dd12 was in last year -- so even more generous than hers. That may be why dd12 has been a major outlier in the GT programs even though she isn't PG.

eta: I, too, don't like the idea of achievement needing to be in place in order to bother testing for ability, but there are also flaws to the broad net approach. Both of our local districts are now testing everyone in 3rd grade in a group format. When dd10 took the CogAT in 3rd grade it was in a classroom with nearly 30 other kids, a teacher who told them all to just hurry up and finish and guess if they were running out of time, and parents walking in and out of the room despite a sign on the door that said "testing, quiet please." I was waiting in the hall to volunteer and saw two parents go in and then loudly apologize when the teacher asked them to leave until testing was done. With a distractable kid with ADD, that is far from an ideal testing format.

Dottie, You are correct. The weaker needs a 120. DD fell into that 0 catagory with a 118 in non verbal and scored 2 points in verbal (I dont recall her score here and its not handy). She is being subject accelerated next year .. she is skipping second grade math. Her teacher and her class' buddy teacher (a 5/6 gifted teacher) were surprised she did not get into the program for second grade.. hence why I am asking a ton of questions.

I am becoming "that" mom

Ah, got it. Ours is still more generous . You could get a 125 (2 pt) score in any one of the three subtests here and be in the 1st percentile on the other two (again, I know unlikely), but you'd still get a GT id for that one 95th percentile score. One of the GT coordinators did tell me that a good majority of the kids with GT ids have composite CogAT scores around the 70th-75th percentile with one area that hit the 95th. I know for a fact that some of these kids were given the CogAT and OLSAT within the course of a few weeks and some were given the exact same test twice within a few months to hit that one 95th.

I'm "that" mom, too ! My dd's high score on the CogAT was nonverbal by far. I can see that being reasonable as she is a pretty out of the box thinker and she really is much, much better at seeing how things fit together than am I (rarely needs to set up equations in math to see what needs to be done for instance). However, she really didn't do well on the verbal part (still above avg, but not GT) and she's twice scored at the 99th percentile + on the WISC verbal.

Part of my fear is that for the magnet school testing (wisc-iv) they need to score 135 in both verbal and non verbal. I really don't think this test fits with her strengths... esp since they aren't even using the quantitative portion of the test. When my ds takes it.. it will be a good fir as he is not only very mathy but his vocabulary is very strong.

FWIW, our school district only gives CoGat and NNAT results in percentiles so I'm not sure how the numbers correlate. We have not found CoGat to have a strong correlation with other non-verbal tests on our DDs. DD11 scored in the 99th percentile on NNAT and scored only in the 79th percentile on CoGat's non-verbal subtest. DD9 scored 99th percentile on NNAT and had a WISC PRI score of 147 (153 with extended norms applied). She only scored in the 89th or 90th percentile on the CoGat non-verbal.

That's about the spread we saw btwn dd's verbal CogAT and her two WISC verbal portions. There was little to no correlation. I don't know; I guess that some of these tests are based on different theories of intelligence and the CogAT, like has been mentioned before, doesn't purport to be an intelligence test per se.

I hate the CogAT

Dear Ms. X,
I have had an opportunity to hand score your daughter's test booklet on the Cognitive Abilities Test. The Verbal Test is made up of two subtests: Oral Vocabulary and Verbal Reasoning for a total of 44 questions. She got 3 questions wrong in oral vocabulary and 1 question wrong in verbal reasoning for a raw score of 40. The Nonverbal Test is made up of two subtests: Figure Classification and Matrices for a total of 44 questions. She got 2 questions wrong in Figure Classification and 1 question wrong in Matrices for a raw score of 41. Her standard age score in verbal was a 122 and her standard age score in nonverbal was a 118. These scores are based on the age of the student.

Since we use only the standard age scores and national percentile scores for our program, those are the only scores we request from Riverside Publishing. Those scores are reported out to parents in our letter. We do not receive any other reports from Riverside. I hope this information has been helpful.

I guess the report they sent home was wrong (or maybe her hand score was wrong as she scored higher on the report we received in verbal. I dont have it with me at the library to check)