Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Confused by test scores

Hannah is 9 years old. We have known she was gifted since she was 2. She talked very early and was speaking in paragraphs by the time she was 17 months old. She was asking VERY profound, deep, even spiritual questions at age 25 months. She wrote her name long before she was three. We were told by her preschool teacher who taught 2's for 22 years that she had never seen a 2 year old with a vocabulary like Hannah's. She has always preferred the company of adults. She is extremely perfectionistic. She is also a people pleaser and I think that may skew some results as she wants badly to fit in with her peers.

She took the ITBS and scored >99%. I don't have those exact results in front of me. She consistently scores in the 99% on the standardized tests. She is an A student with no effort. The school gave her the COGAT. She was not accepted into the gifted program based on these scores, but I KNOW the child is gifted. Please help me understand what might be going on. Also, should we have her tested privately? She is totally bored with school so I am planning to homeschool her next year.

COGAT scores:

Cognitive Ability Test
V 92
Q 92
C 89

Achievement
R 88
M 90
T 92

Creativity
GIFT 69

Motivation
R 30
M 37
SS 40
S 30
G 63

I don't even know how to interpret these results. I just know that this doesn't feel right to me. How should I proceed? TIA

I'd start by reading this. See Types of Tests and Intelligence Tests:

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/tests_tell_us.htm


Hoagies also has good links about CogAT.

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/tests.htm

Thank you for that link. Do you think I should pursue private testing?

I would pursue private testing. My older DD had CogAT scores similar to your DD's but her WISC IV results were FSIQ of 138 with a Verbal of 146. The CogAT was simply not a good test of her abilities. I found out later that they read part of the test out loud to the kids which is very distracting for her.

It depends on what grade the child is in. Second grade and under is administered with the proctor or teacher reading the test to the kids. Third grade and up are done without the teacher reading it.

We had a similar result on the CogAT. My youngest, a 3rd grader, scored in the 80s for the composite score on the CogAT and at the 99.9th percentile on the WISC. We're pursuing additional private testing and our dd, too, has been rejected for the gifted program due to her CogAT scores and her achievement scores on MAPs being very erratic.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that was how it was always done. Just that this is one reason why a child who is gifted may not show that on the CogAT.