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Joined: Feb 2012
Posts: 1,390
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Joined: Feb 2012
Posts: 1,390 |
This past year has been really tough for my DD, with lots of meltdowns at school and being put on a behavior plan. She is in a gifted cluster program, and has struggled even though the work is not very academically difficult (IMO).
There have been a lot of changes in this program this past year, and they are changing the composition of the gifted program. As part of this, they agreed to stratify the kids by their verbal CogAT scores into classrooms next year. Some parents apparently objected to using year-old scores for this, so their teacher administered the verbal section (only) to the class (with a one-day notice to opt out).
My daughter's score (which I didn't get in any official report, but mentioned in passing in the notes on her report card) dropped by 15 points, which seems like quite a lot for a test like this. Should I try to follow up on this result, or just wait and see where they place her next year and go from there?
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Joined: Oct 2011
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IIRC, that means she missed one more question than last year. The CogAT is a very short test, so unless it's causing your child to miss out on services they need, I wouldn't worry about it.
~amy
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Joined: Feb 2012
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Really? One question? That's interesting, especially because the district makes such a big deal about these scores. She has a friend who moved up from 125 to 133 at this administration - is that also one question?
I don't know where she will be placed next year. She'll be in the gifted program, but I don't really know what "stratify by Verbal CogAT" will mean in practice. I'm more worried about her getting a teacher that can handle her emotionally than I am about her academics. My husband is more worried about the academics.
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Joined: May 2009
Posts: 648
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I think it is totally idiotic for the school to use the CogAT to separate out levels within a gifted population, unless the school is administering the test *way* out of level. The CogAT is merely a screening test, though most district officials who make decisions based on it don't seem to know the first thing about it.
Personally, if it were up to me, I'd "stratify" by observed achievement.
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Joined: Jan 2008
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I think it is totally idiotic for the school to use the CogAT to separate out levels within a gifted population, unless the school is administering the test *way* out of level. The CogAT is merely a screening test, though most district officials who make decisions based on it don't seem to know the first thing about it.
Personally, if it were up to me, I'd "stratify" by observed achievement. I completely agree with Kai. The CogAT is a GT screener for potential or likelihood of GT. Clustering, I would guess, is most successful based on achievement.
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Joined: Feb 2012
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Yes, I think they've fallen into this as a way of placating parents of students already in the program as they expand the GT pool. This is what the district web site says about it: Verbal Domain Grouping will provide gifted students with opportunities to engage in intellectually stimulating endeavors with peers who are equally capable of learning at comparable levels. Purposeful grouping of students has been shown to increase intellectual engagement and qualitatively affect measurable academic growth. Homerooms will provide students opportunities to explore content areas with depth, complexity, and pacing suited to their intellectual abilities. The CogAT Verbal domain, our best indicator of reading and comprehension potential, will be used to assign students to homerooms for literacy, social studies and science, since success in these subjects is most closely correlated with verbal ability. Student service in the math domain will be determined by academic performance on placement tests. Students will then be assigned to math classrooms, at appropriate levels, with opportunities for content and process differentiation. I'm pretty sure they are not administering it way out of level, although without a score report, who knows what they did? I know that they tested, that my DD8 said it was "pretty easy," and what the district says about their plans above. I don't know who the teachers will be in her new school (they are moving half the kids, and they claim that half the teachers will move, but I've heard from other sources that that's not true), who would be a good teacher for her, or what's going to happen. If they stratified by observed achievement, that would probably be worse for DD, since she has been seriously underachieving this year because of the behavioral issues. She has two neuropsych appointments in July. We'll see what we learn from those.
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Joined: Feb 2012
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Huh, just got a response to the email my husband send the Gifted Coordinator. She says that DD got the same number of questions wrong as last year - the difference in score is due to being a year older. She also says that she is in the upper 1/6th of the tested students, so I guess she'll still "stratify" high.
It's very difficult to be patient with all this. :p
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Joined: May 2009
Posts: 648
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Huh, just got a response to the email my husband send the Gifted Coordinator. She says that DD got the same number of questions wrong as last year - the difference in score is due to being a year older. That doesn't make any sense, assuming that they gave a test for kids a year older. It sounds like they gave the *same* test as they did last year, which would be totally inappropriate.
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Joined: Feb 2012
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Totally inappropriate, but not surprising.
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