Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment New to all this -- 2nd grader and CogAT scores

Hello,

Papers just came home with my son indicating that this CogAT scores are 93 verbal, 97 non verbal, 97 quantitative for the age percentiles (they are higher for the grade percentiles).

He is a in a Catholic school that has overall high academic standards but not a special gifted program.

I want to make sure he gets the instruction he needs -- it does seem the math he has been doing is a bit easy for him (though he rushes through it and makes careless mistakes -- still he has a 97/A on his report card in Math).

Any tips on how to proceed from here? Talk to the teacher? Do tests on our own? Whether these scores are truly that "high" or whether they are a result of him coming from a stable family, upper-middle class environment, being of good health, and being in a good school. His parents are PhD scientists and we think we are smart, but that *that* smart . . but we do value learning more than many, which probably also puts him at an advantage.

Really, just wondering how meaningful these scores are and what next steps there may be.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

How old is he? Taking the Explore Test through Duke TIP or similar was a huge eye opener for us. I have experienced and seen plenty of times parents who are in gifted denial--your idea of typical development may not be accurate.

plagio,

Some schools use CogAT as screening test for giftedness. If the kid gets 95 percentile or higher, would be labeled gifted.

But it is more meaningful if it is at least above level testing. 2nd grader can not take EXPLORE from Duke but he may be able to take John Hopkins CTY SCAT exam.

http://cty.jhu.edu/talent/

But first, talk to the school and see if they can do accomodation. When you say that the percentile is higher for grade, you mean that he is old for his grade? Then, consider skipping a grade.

Thank you for these comments. I'm just getting to them now as I was out of town for the weekend. He is 7, but will turn 8 in a few weeks.

By percentile higher for grade, I mean that he was 97 composite for age, but 98 composite for grade.

Even though it seems like his turning 8 in November might make him old for a second grader, where we are, in NC, it seems that his age is pretty average relative to his classmate.

I asked for some information on how the students did overall, at his school which is K-8, though I do not know if all grades took tests. This is what we were told (they refer to Iowa test, but what he had was CogAT, which I understand is put out by the Iowa company:

"The Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) results for your child were included ..... The ITBS is administered in the month of October in the Diocese of XXXXX to be used as a diagnostic/ prescriptive tool. These tests cannot be compared to the End of Grade tests given by our public school counterparts, as ITBS tests are used as a tool to help identify strengths and weaknesses. For example, it is expected that the students would not know all of the concepts in the Grade 3 test, because they have just begun Grade 3. Students who take the test in the spring would naturally have a different outcome than those who test in the fall. The parent copy of ITBS scores included your child�s National Percentile Ranking. Please keep in mind that this is not the same as percent. Instead, it is a comparative rank of your child to all others in his/ her age group nationwide. The 50th percentile is average. If your child scored in the 75th percentile, that indicates that he/she scored better than 75% of all students in his age group. School norms are also used to indicate the status or rank of the school compared to other schools in the nation. Score reports indicate that our school composite percentile rank average among all schools in the nation was 98.5%. Stanines are another way of understanding performance. Stanines essentially group percentile ranges by dividing them into 9 parts, with the largest number of individuals falling in the middle stanines. Our school�s score report was strong this year with a National Stanine of 7.5.

My son's stanines are 9, but since the school scored so high overall, I feel like he would be "average" for the school. Isn't that so?

However, I am going to look into the Duke and Hopkins evals mentioned.

Thanks again.

I think the Explore will be really useful--although usually people wait until the child is in 4th grade. In the meantime I would do some more reading here and at Hoagie's Gifted to try to get a feel for where you think your son might fit. Good luck.