Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Practice Tests for Cogat - Grade2

My husband got this book from Amazon - '4 Practice Tests for Cogat'. It was only $26 and has tons of content for the Grade 2 Cogat testing in the format of the test. We have seen a bunch of books and this one is good. I recommend it. My daughter looks forward to working on it every morning.

Anyone knows if there are similar books for OLSAT?

I don't encourage 'practicing' for any test used similarly to an IQ test, because it makes it harder to compare 'apples to apples.' Not that I don't sympathise, because the Cogat and OLSAT can be very unfair to the very gifted kids they are screening for - and all kids deserve to get their academic needs met.

But still....
Grinity

There are several books and "prep bundles" on Amazon for the Cogat. I think it is inevitable that if a test is used to decide something parents think is important, they will prepare their children for the test. The SAT is useful even though there is much more preparation material available now than 40 years ago. Ideally other tests used for selection would be similarly robust.

I think there is an additional problem of schools not being challenging enough for most kids, and many available GT offerings are probably beneficial to lots of kids, whether or not they would pass the CogAT without prepping. If a little prepping will lead to an adequate education, where otherwise it might be underwhelming, then in that situation I say go for it.

Also, I imagine if my kid were not a good test taker, I have a feeling I would want to help him out by familiarizing him with the types of things that might be on a test. Since I don't have that issue, and my kid scores super high on every test he's taken, I cannot fault others for their choices.

It would be nice if all the kids were in the same boat with these tests, starting with no prep so you could get a fairly good apples to apples comparison, but in reality it ain't gonna happen.

I've done a lot of strange things for parenting ....even help my son cheat at video games. I don't question an individual parents individual decision on CoGat especially since it is widely so misused....but I does give me a creepy feeling to see it talked about here.

I think it is ok that some things we do but don't talk about. It raises the bar on how desperate we have to feel to do them and that can be very useful.

If the line isn't here then where is it?
Love and more love
Grinity

I know we disagree on this but the SAT is currently an achievement test and has been for many years. The custom in the US is currently to study for the SAT and the publishers of the test are in the test prep business as well. When the publishers of CoGat publish test prep books and post them on their website Ill know that things have changed.

I don't think that you want to encourage testmakers to be as tricky as the SAT writers particularly with elementary school age kids.

That robustness comes with a high cost both literally in test design and in oddness of the test.

Love and more Love
Grinity

I would make the law the line. Psychologists are strictly prohibited from divulging the questions on IQ tests, so I would not try to get a peek. If Cogat books are sold openly on Amazon, they must not be giving away confidential material, and I would not feel guilty about using them.

There are lots and lots of prep books out there for the SAT, for high school. That is why there are so many perfect SAT scores today. That is why Mensa doesn't accept the SAT score anymore.
I used to teach Kaplan courses many years ago for SAT, ACT, and later MCAT. My experience was that you could increase your scores 100-200 (or perhaps more), on a total of 1600, by taking a prep course.
I remember one time, a student chatted with me at the break. "The math is so hard!" she said to me. "yes, I said, but you can study and get better." "I've never had geometry and it's hard," she told me.
I thought, what kind of high school are you going to where you haven't had geometry by 11th grade? "Oh," she said, "I'm only ten!" I looked closely at her and realized she did look very young and she had a Hello Kitty pencil box! I guess she was prepping for the SAT for the Hopkins program or something.
Now THAT I thought wasn't appropriate.

I guess that's why I wouldn't use the 'what is legal' approach here. Both talent search testing and tests like the CogAT and OLSAT are used as aptitude or ability tests. While they aren't controlled tests like IQ tests, schools use them that way. I've known people who've crossed the line much more than buying practice tests (there are ways to get copies of the actual test).

I, too, understand the despiration especially as, like others have mentioned, what passes as GT placement is often something many kids could benefit from and which is not sufficient for kids who are gifted. As a parent of a 2e child who is a very out of the box thinker, a test like the CogAT was not in her benefit. Would I have prepped her to get a higher score so she'd be recognized as gifted? In hindsight, I still don't know that I would have. Why? Because the message it would give my daughter wouldn't be one I'd want to convey. I wouldn't want her to think that her scores on this one test were so important that she had to do everything she could to do well on it, that being called gifted by the schools was a status symbol... Part of this comes from the way gifted is treated in our local schools. It is treated as better. The kids who are in GT pull outs brag about it. The parents brag about it.

Instead of prepping dd (which might not have done much good anyway, to be honest), I took the route of arguing with the district about their policy and got them to change it. They wouldn't take dd's upper 140s WISC scores, but after getting an entire committee together to review dd's test scores, they now will take IQ scores. If the process is flawed, I'm more in favor of fighting to make it right than doing questionable things to fit within it although I certainly do understand the temptation.

Grinity, I agree with you in principal, and in fact when I didn't really know what I wanted to do in life, I took the LSAT without prep, thinking that if I didn't do well enough, maybe law school was not for me... (Stupid plan, as I did well enough to get in, but not well enough to get so many scholarships, which I likely could have done if I had studied!) But the fact remains that there never will really be a level playing field except maybe the very first time a different type of test comes out, where it's impossible to prep.

I think if the GT programs are worth it, and really are beneficial to the kids who need them, the parents who prep their kids to get into the program may have the plan backfire if their kids do not do so well once in the program. You want your kids to get a decent education, but you don't want to torture them with something that's too hard/too fast for them in reality. But I think the true GT programs are more rare (i.e., not just enrichment or methods of teaching that can benefit all kids). And this whole prepping thing will work itself out by locality.

Of course, the better practice to screen for GT is to consider several factors, not just one test that will not catch the kids whose parents haven't had a chance to prep them.....

I have to agree with Grinity. While I think that it is appropriate to demand more challenging curriculum, and while I am aware that some of our kids aren't good test takers (DD11 can NOT seem to get the rhythm of test taking down and will sit on a problem in a timed test rather than skip it and come back), I have deep concerns about prepping kids for these kinds of tests. I don't think that they are equivalent to college entrance tests which are widely prepped for in a very open way. Several concerns:

First, it masks data in a way which will perpetuate the underidentification of kids who do not come from middle/upper middle class backgrounds. As well educated families artificially raise the scores of kids who are likely to already be advantaged in vocabulary and general exposure to content, it will become even harder to see the children with raw ability but disadvantaged backgrounds. I think part of the point of using a test like COGAT is to try and identify the kids who have achievement that is out of line with ability indicators.

Second, from a parent standpoint, it muddies the value of the test for those of us who are feeling our way through the "how-atypical-is-this?" puzzle. We can't all afford individual IQ testing, especially if we have multiple children. Aptitude measures and out of level testing are helpful to us, but only if our unprepared children are taking them along with other unprepared children. Prepping turns these tests into acheivement tests, since it ends up measuring how well a child has learned to interpret a taught problem type.


Third, I think that the end impact for children who would have very high scores without being prepped is that they look equivalent to children who actually don't have the same educational needs. This, it would seem to me, would lead to less rigor than needed in follow up programming.


All of that said, the crux of the problem is that too many districts use tests like COGAT as a stand alone gatekeeper. It should be one of several possible indicators, and should not be used to exclude children from educational options.

It is scary to have a child who does not shine until properly programmed for, because it creates a vicious cycle where lack of opportunity begets underachievement and underacheivement begets continued lack of opportunities. I get that in a big way. IMHO though, prepping invalidates the value of an aptitude instrument and makes it hard to make progress in moving schools to better meet the needs of gifted kids. Kids can be prepped to get better scores, but it won't make them more gifted. What it will do is create a misleading impression of what gifted is. Many educators have very limited knowledge or experience with giftedness. In part, these educators learn as they meet and work with kids who they are told are gifted. So what happens when they program for bright kids who they've been told are gifted and that programming works? How do they learn that what they are doing is inadequate for gifted learners?

Please note, I am not suggesting that a child is not gifted because a child has prepped for a test. I'm sure that there are both gifted and bright children who prep. My comments relate not to the impact or outcome for any single child, but to the potential danger when we look at it on a broader scale.

After reading through this thread, my thoughts on the ethics of prepping for tests in general run along these lines:

1. If the test materials are indicated as secret by the publisher, it's not OK to prep specifically for that test.

2. If the test materials are indicated as open by the publisher, it's OK to prep specifically for that test. (I'm not sure whether any of the tests we routinely discuss here fall into this category.)

3. However, buying any actual copy of a test is almost certainly not OK, unless the publisher has released previous versions themselves (e.g. past LSATs). With an IQ test like the SB5 or WISC-IV, where I am guessing that problems are released fairly infrequently, it would be extremely unethical. Buying any current copy of any test is obviously wrong.

4. If the test materials are not indicated as either secret or open by the publisher, the more that an array of third-party test prep material and services is allowed to flourish unchecked, the greater the likelihood that it is OK to prep specifically for that test, as the publisher may implicitly authorize test prep by their inaction. (At the other end of the possibly implicitly authorized third-party prep materials, if a few independent, low-quality publishers claim to offer test prep, the materials are not sold through large outlets like Amazon that make some effort to police their offerings for legality, there are open lawsuits based on the third-party prep materials, etc., it is less likely OK to prep specifically for that test.)

5. It's always OK to teach thinking skills. So, for example, the mere presence of analogies on different types of tests doesn't mean one can't expose a child to analogies. For another example, over-the-top stressful hothousing of things like vocabulary wouldn't be unethical test prep, though it would be bad parenting.

6. It's always OK to practice test-taking in general, to lower stress levels etc.

(7. The fact that test prep will inevitably happen to some degree is a compelling reason not to rely just on numbers from one type of test, or maybe any types of preppable tests.)

I took the time to review some CogAT test prep materials available on Amazon, based on Bostonian's mention. Some of them seem to just be bundles of materials from, for example, the Critical Thinking Company, including Mind Benders and other materials that parents here sometimes buy for their children just to challenge them and develop thinking skills. Here's an example, and here's another non-Amazon offering along similar lines. Under my Rule # 5 above, I consider these to be okay, unless we are prepared to insist that kids must be tested in their natural, untaught, vegetative state.

In a different category are prep materials like this Practice Test for the Cognitive Abilities Test CogAT, which includes in its "Editorial Reviews" description the following (and here's the publisher's website):

Looking at the description, I again see some things that can't be off-base to teach children, like verbal analogies. These materials are also presumably not the subject of a lawsuit, or I'd expect Amazon to pull them after notification from test publisher Riverside. At this point I was thinking that perhaps the publisher implicitly authorized teaching to the test.

I followed up to see if there was any information from the publisher on prepping for the CogAT, and found the following paper linked from Riverside's website, written by one of the two authors of the CogAT:
Lohman, D. F. (2006). Practical advice on using the Cognitive Abilities test as part of a talent identification system.

From page 15:
From all of this, I conclude that the Mercer Publishing materials are okay to use too. The test publisher seems to allow publication by third parties of extensive study materials, and insists that students be exposed not only to the rules of the test, but even practice questions, at least days in advance of a test.

My personal opinion, short answer: you can apparently prep for the CogAT in any way, except for buying actual CogAT tests only intended to be sold to testers, without ethical worry. And in a highly competitive locale which uses the CogAT, based on the easy availability of high-quality third-party prep materials, prepping might actually be the closest approach to an apples-to-apples comparison.

Would I prep my son for the CogAT? Probably not, as I don't think I'd need to even if that test were used in our school district. However, I have bought him some books that include things like analogies in the past. I didn't buy them to prep specifically for a test, but rather because they were used in my GT program when I was a child. I refuse to feel bad for stimulating my child to think.

I guess we could wrangle over whether the intent behind some teaching or other intellectual stimulation can make it wrong, where the content itself is not objectionable. I simply can't pass judgment on someone else for teaching their child general thinking skills for any reason. There should be more of it, not less. My wife just proposed a hypothetical: a parent exposes their child to lots of analogies and vocabulary leading up to a test, resulting in a high score, and then afterward does nothing, resulting in much lower numbers a year or two later. My wife thinks that would be wrong. I would agree, but place the blame on the failure to stimulate except near a test time.

ETA: Based on finding practice tests for the OLSAT published by Pearson (next post), I'm wondering if it is more ethical / less unethical to prep for group-administered tests in general, barring of course some information from the publisher that they consider it to be wrong.

ETA 2: Pearson apparently does not produce any practice tests for the NNAT.

ETA 3: I noticed these pre-tests for the CogAT: http://www.riversidepublishing.com/products/cogAt/pricing_pretest.html#1

Note the language about supplying credentials in order to buy the tests (and my next post about pretests for the OLSAT); I'm not sure how much that applies to these pretests. However, I do think the mere existence of pretests from the publisher makes it more likely to be okay to prep for the CogAT.

ETA 4: IT IS POSITIVELY NOT OKAY TO PREP EXTENSIVELY AT HOME FOR THE COGAT. Grinity followed up with the test publisher, and found that they only release prep materials with the intent that they be used by schools.

The publisher of the OLSAT, Pearson, apparently publishes OLSAT practice tests.

However, during checkout this warning appears: "Your qualifications should be on file with us before you complete your order or there may be a delay." This is probably a general warning based on Pearson selling a lot of psychologist-only materials, but you might want to call them to see if parents are also intended to buy those OLSAT prep materials. I don't know why they wouldn't be; practice is practice, and Pearson offers a lot of practice test bundles for the OLSAT, more than I'd expect just to familiarize a student with the format of the test.

If it appears that the publisher thinks practicing privately for the OLSAT is okay, here are a couple of additional searches that might help: Amazon Google

Hmm. In looking at the CogAT information I also see they refer to it as a measure of "learned reasoning". So perhaps my concerns should really be aimed at a misuse of the test by schools? I doubt most schools are spending time making sure that all students are learning to do the kinds of problems that are on the test, so I see two problems. First, the equal access concerns that I raised previously, and second, the interpretation (misinterpretation?) of results when prepped students and unprepped students are being considered and compared within the same group. I see it a bit the way I see the grade level question that comes up periodically as related to EXPLORE. Grade accelerated students are supposed to be considered alongside students of the grade they've accelerated to because they are then being compared to kids who have been exposed to the same content. Yet there is certainly a difference between a 3rd grader who is instructed at a fifth grade level and a fifth grader who is instructed at a fifth grade level, even if they have identical EXPLORE scores. And there is a significant difference between two third graders who score at the same level but have been exposed to different levels of curriculum.

All of which begs the question....is there any good
screener out there that schools can use to accurately identify students who are slipping under the radar due to learning style, lack of opportunity/exposure, language proficiency, etc.? And, without taking an individual IQ test, how do parents get an accurate picture of their children's typicality or atypicality? Maybe that's not possible? And is there any role for context in helping schools accurately identify needs? Or will that just lead to inaccurate parent reporting for fear that information they share will be used against them?

Well, I can't answer your question, but I can say that the most useful tests in terms of finding out where my kid is compared to his classmates and where he should be going next have been the NWEA MAP tests. The schools that use these best will group kids with similar scores together and provide appropriate content based on what the students already know. And though of course we're talking GT, these tests are useful to educating of all kids, GT or not. Avoids the whole issue of GT - teach the the readiness of the kid. (Yes, of course this is an oversimplified response.)

Yes, I see the value in tests like MAP. Our district will begin using it and, while I'm reserving a smidge of judgement until I see it in action, I tend to think it's a good move. Conceptually, I prefer adaptive testing formats like MAP that don't require students to spend a lot of time answering questions that are significantly off-level.

I guess what I'm looking for (and this is where I worry about test prep) are ways to pick out some of those "caged cheetahs". I love the Stephanie Tolan essay, "Is It A Cheetah", because it acknowledges that there are highly gifted students who are invisible in school because they never have the chance to show what they can truly do. Those students sit unidentified (even sometimes with aware, advocating parents) because their classroom performance looks unremarkable. They will not excel on tests like MAP because they have never seen some of the content--their unremarkable classroom performance doesn't suggest a need to accelerate them to what they could do in the right circumstances.

A personal example: when DD was 9 she took a math reasoning test. She was then assessed with some district assessments, based on district standards. I did not find out until much later that she scored above the 99th percentile on both the regular and gifted scales of the reasoning test. What I was told at the time is that she was hitting standards a year or two ahead, and therefore could be instructed in the regular classroom with some differentiation. In hindsight (and with the belated information from the reasoning test), I draw a different conclusion. I conclude that the discrepancy showed inadequate classroom instruction. It was improperly paced given what she was capable of acquiring.

For students who need something other than the opportunity to work with materials from later grades (or even in those higher grade level classrooms)--for students who actually need instruction delivered in a different manner and at a different pace, acheivement tests will continue to be an inadequate identification tool. Acheivement tests will particularly miss the gifted children who come from uneducated family backgrounds or who have had undifferentiated classroom instruction and opportunities. In many ways, I think these are the children who most need to be identified early on, and who most need intervention that is based on ability rather than acheivement.

Which brings me back again to my discomfort with test prep for reasoning tests. How do we find those kids if they have peers who are able to prep for these tests when they are not able to do the same? Am I just not showing enough confidence in the quality of the tool? Does prep not make a significant enough impact to worry about?

I think test prep probably does have a sizable impact, just as any sort of learning that increases ability is going to have an impact. How much? I have no idea. But I understand your worries and share them. It's obvious others here do too. When you have young children especially, the enrichment they've received will make some of them seem highly advanced compared to age peers (or perhaps they will be highly advanced, but not in a way that correlates fully to intelligence levels they will reach later). Hence similar concerns over parents hothousing their children. Learning works!

The thing is, I don't think you can easily draw a bright line with some of these issues. How much, exactly, would taught material have to resemble the specific format and/or content of items on a particular test, to even constitute specific test prep?

And how much teaching/enrichment/stimulation is unfair hothousing? People comment in negative, sometimes offhand ways about hothousing; for example we've heard people here relate how some jealous parents comment that their children haven't been "given the same opportunities". The comments are often offered as commentary that a hothousing parent is essentially abusing their child, but what's really at the heart of the label? Jealousy and angst that someone else's children have or will have advantages over the speaker's own, and a violated sense of fairness based on the speaker's own choices.

And is it really desirable that kids not be taught, just to try to get a more valid benchmark on a test, especially knowing that some parents would always cheat the system? Or should the solution be to try to improve the imperfect assessment tools, rely on more than test numbers from a single test for identification, etc.?

Testing is inherently imperfect, and you can't control what a parent will do in her own home. It would be more workable and fair in my opinion to expose all children to some standardized test prep before a test, rather than try to enforce a lack of prep.

This is one of the reasons I'm uncomfortable with heavy reliance on achievement for identification of giftedness. Some reliance is okay, as it's some evidence, but underprivileged and other under-the-radar, unidentified children will always tend to be at a disadvantage.

I just wanted to point out that the OP is most likely a spammer. He/She only has 2 posts on this forum and while this one talks about using the book with her daughter the other post just a few minutes later talks about using it with his/her son.

I have seen very similar posts about this same book on a local city data forum, a local mothering forum, and a local gifted listserv all in the past week.

Yes, I remember thinking "probably spam" at the time, but it wasn't blatant enough to report as such - and look, it lead to an interesting discussion! That's the best kind of spam :-)

I would agree with your points here, although I would hate to see yet more time spent on test prep in school: it's hard enough to find the time to teach everything....
One of the more interesting ideas I've heard suggests looking at "x" percentage of each demographic tested. That makes sense to me, although the follow up would have to be differentiated with current achievement levels in mind. In my fantasy approach, schools identify and form several types of gifted clusters (each in a different classroom). One cluster would be students who need fully individualized learning opportunities/instruction. These students likely top out both aptitude and achievement testing. Another cluster would be kids who can be instructed as a group, but with an approach and materials that are actually different in both form and content from general education practices/curriculum. These students are near or at the top of achievement and aptitude testing, but aren't quite as far out there and/or are not the kinds of learners who want a completely individualized approach. I'm thinking that the fourth grader who has not been grade accelerated but tops 20 on everything on the EXPLORE test would be typical of the first group; the 16-20's or scattered scores would be typical of this second group. A third cluster would be a combination of bright/mildly gifted students. These students will excel given curriculum that is a 1-2 years ahead and/or with differentiated materials and assignments. However, they can succeed and have needs met with a regular approach, as long as the material is sufficiently advanced. Finally(?), I would envision a cluster that includes kids with high ability indicators relative to their demographic group, but lower than expected achievement. Depending on the specific students, school, etc. this might be two clusters--one in which kids are underachieving due to intrinsic differences which need to be addressed, and one in which kids are underachieving due to lack of an enriched lifestyle. In my fantasy world this also allows teachers at each grade level to learn and specialize in different types of gifted education. Sometimes it seems that even where schools use clustering, they lack an appreciation of the differences between gifted students and create clusters that don't work well together.

I wouldn't want parents to withold what they think will meet the needs of their children, and I recognize that the types of problems on CogAT and other instruments are just plain fun for some of our children. If there was a variety of options for meeting the range of needs on the gifted end of the spectrum, maybe parents wouldn't feel a need to be so cautious about what they share with schools, and prepping wouldn't be an issue at all--it would just be part of the overall picture a school had of a child when trying to figure out which placement was the best fit. I guess what I want is an all cards honestly on the table approach to understanding typicality/atypicality. So many of us have had experiences in at least one subject area where we hear, "oh we have lots of students who....your child will fit right in here". With some of the picture obscured by circumstances that are not readily shared, and with other parts of the picture obscured by instruments or learning opportunities with inadequate ceilings, it is no wonder that this is too often a false statement.

The founders of Google agree with me that the SAT is an intelligence test, according to a book review in today's WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576351650017002270.html
How Google Got Going
by David A. Price

(review of the book
I'm Feeling Lucky
By Douglas Edwards
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 416 pages, $27))


'Also embedded in Google's mindset was a belief in hiring only the best engineers. Of course, every company claims to seek the strongest talent. What impressed Mr. Edwards were the extremes to which Google took this policy, particularly during a boom time when it seemed like companies were hiring any techie with a pulse. The first Google systems administrator Mr. Edwards encountered was a self-taught networking whiz with a Yale medical degree�a reflection of the weight that the Messrs. Brin and Page gave to elite academic credentials, even if not in computer science. Google demanded to see job candidates' high-school SAT scores, Mr. Edwards says, confident that the numbers revealed intelligence, not just "scholastic aptitude."'

Besides this anecdotal evidence, there is research by Detterman on the SAT and ACT and IQ.

Back when Google was doing this, they were probably looking @ SAT scores from the time when it did correlate with IQ. As mentioned earlier, groups like Mensa take older SAT scores as equivalent to IQ but not newer versions. When I took the SAT years ago, it was the Scholastic Aptitude Test. SAT now stands for Scholastic Assessment or Achievement Test.

Yep, and others. I think it's also interesting that the test itself has been renamed the "SAT Reasoning Test".

No, the letters "SAT" no longer stand for anything officially. I have read that, and the Wikipedia SAT article confirms it.

Okay, but either way the newer SAT reasoning test isn't what was being looked at in research that said that the SAT was essentially equivalent to an IQ test. I don't believe that there has been any research indicating that the newer SAT is anything more than an achievement test.

Back on the original thoughts, though, and despite the fact that prep is widely done and places kids who don't prep at a disadvantage, I still can't condone prepping. IMHO whether everyone else is doing it or not and whether the test is being misused or not, studying for a test that is being used as an ability test is not right.

I would guess that ALL achievement tests are rather highly correlated with 'g' with IQ tests being a bit more highly correlated, yes?

I don't know the actual cut offs for 'g' correlation of the various Achiement tests and IQ tests. It would be nice to see them on a graph and see some dots clustering together in 2 eyeball-able groups.

In considering my co-workers, I appreciate both 'high enough' IQ and 'good enough' work ethic. One without the other is a pretty severe limitation at times.

((shrug))
Grinity

More information on the correlation with IQ: http://wikien4.appspot.com/wiki/SAT

The implementation of the "newer SAT reasoning test" seems to have been just a rename, at least at the time of the name change. From the encycwopedia:

Did the basic nature of the SAT change recently? Although the SAT has certainly had changes, I wouldn't jump to a conclusion that the IQ correlation results are invawwid because of the changes.

What's with the bizarre spelling in the above quote? Deliberate garbling imposes a needless inconvenience on readers.

What I was looking at was the 2005 update -- the time at which it became what is often referred to as the "new SAT." From the wiki article quoted above:

The research that correlates IQ with SAT scores was all looking at administrations of the test prior to the 2005 changes. My understanding was that things like the analogies, which were removed in 2005, were the parts that were the most g correlated on the SAT. I took a psychometrics class a few years back at a local university as well in which the professor, a psychometrician, said that the new SAT (2005 and later) was more similar to the ACT and no longer considered a test of aptitude or ability.

Thanks for pointing out the garbling - I followed the link and got to
I have no idea what is going on, but apparently there is some version of wikipedia written entirely as if Elmer Fudd were speaking it... too bad DS15 is at summer camp - a quick google search didn't help me understand it at all.

BTW - I think based on lucounu's past behavior, we can rule out deliberate garbling.

Smiles,
Grinity

A paper in the journal Intelligence (reference below) found that ACT scores were correlated 0.77 with a measure of g, so I think the ACT can be regarded as an IQ test. The authors write "It appears that ACT scores can be used to accurately predict IQ in the general population." They also write,

"As discussed in the opening of this article, ACT, Inc. claims that the ACT is not an IQ test, but rather measures the preparedness of the test-taker for advanced education. Given the results of the current study, this statement is misleading. Colleges that use scores on the ACT and
SAT for admission decisions are basing admissions partially on intelligence test results. Whether this is acceptable or efficient practice is beyond the scope of this article, but we argue that the testing companies have a responsibility to the public to accurately describe what
these widely-used tests measure."

The ACT and the College Board don't use the word "intelligence" in describing what their tests measure, because that immediately raises the question of why large differences exist between average test scores in various demographic groups. The obvious but non-PC answer is that the patterns are the same ones found in "official" IQ tests such as the WISC and Stanford-Binet.

http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/koening2008.pdf
ACT and general cognitive ability
Katherine A. Koenig ⁎, Meredith C. Frey, Douglas K. Detterman
Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, United States
Intelligence 36 (2008) 153�160
Received 1 July 2006; received in revised form 16 March 2007; accepted 27 March 2007
Available online 2 May 2007
Abstract
Research on the SAT has shown a substantial correlation with measures of g such as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude
Battery (ASVAB). Another widely administered test for college admission is the American College Test (ACT). Using the National
Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, measures of g were derived from the ASVAB and correlated with ACT scores for 1075
participants. The resulting correlation was .77. The ACT also shows significant correlations with the SAT and several standard IQ
tests. A more recent sample (N=149) consisting of ACT scores and the Raven's APM shows a correlation of .61 between Raven'sderived
IQ scores and Composite ACT scores. It appears that ACT scores can be used to accurately predict IQ in the general
population.

Do you have any thoughts about how to get around it? I feel very similarly, in part because I want to make sure that I have a clear sense of what the results do or don't mean. If I could go and spend time getting to know the kids my kids are clustered with, I would have some sense of whether or not they were appropriately clustered. Since I don't get to do that (not only because it isn't possible but because my kids would kill me ), I have to rely somewhat on what test scores seem to show. I just don't know how to interpret the scores--and I have major concerns about how schools will interpret those scores--without knowing which students did or did not prep. I almost wish there was some kind of handicapping system like bowlers use It would make it easier to match the right apples to the right oranges for instructional purposes.

Gee, do you think the teachers could be taught to be good at noticing if kids were appropriately clustered? Or is it something that one has to have an unusually high IQ oneself to have that sense?

I do think that grouping that focusing on current achievement is the answer. Don't stop the reading test when you get one grade above agelevel - keep going and actually check all the kids. Then group, across grade if nescessary.

Same with Math, spelling, writing. It doesn't seem like such a big deal. Pretest before units and send the ones who already have it to the library for project work, or practice things that can be drilled on a computer.

((shrugs))
Grinity

In reality, your approach can become a racial quota system for admission to gifted programs (which I oppose), as described by Laura Vanderkam in the Gifted Exchange blog:

http://giftedexchange.blogspot.com/2011/07/making-numbers-come-out-right.html
Making the Numbers Come Out Right

...

In the New Haven district, school officials were concerned that too many white and Asian students were being identified as gifted (alternately, one could say that they were concerned that too few black and Latino children were identified as gifted, but these are really flip sides of the same coin). So they put the program on hold and revamped the process. Now, the percent of white students in the program has fallen from 15 percent to 10 percent, reflecting their total fourth-grade population of 9 percent. As the article notes, "Chinese students, who make up 7 percent of the population, used to be 23 percent of the GATE program. Now that number is 9 percent. The number of Vietnamese GATE students has dropped from 9 percent to 4 percent -- equal to their percentage of the total population."

"The results are remarkable," Chief Academic Officer Wendy Gudalewicz told the Oakland Tribune. "The students that we identified as gifted and talented in this district represent the ethnic makeup of our student body."

How did this magic happen? "The new process uses two ways to identify GATE students -- through academic achievement and using a checklist system to find students who are gifted and talented in other ways, such as creativity and leadership," according to the article. "The academic pathway gives students a numerical score based on their performance in reading and math and, for fourth-graders, language. Officials then identify the top 5 percent districtwide within each racial and ethnic subgroup in each of the academic areas, reviewing the results for proportional gender representation. The other pathway to the program is through a nomination process to identify students with unique learning styles, creative ability, leadership skills or artistic ability. These students must be nominated by two adults, at least one of whom must be employed at the student's school."

In other words, the school district is setting out to make sure the proportions look right, and (shockingly) has achieved that.

The whole thing is a bit farcical. I have no doubt that someone can be a gifted leader -- but this is the problem with making gifted programs a reward, or a pull-out with special classes, or field trips, or what have you. All kids can benefit from enriched classes. What academically gifted children need is accelerated academic work that challenges them to the extent of their abilities. It's not about being fun, or being recognized for being a good, creative kid. It's about giving someone the opportunity to do work that is hard enough that they really, truly could fail. I keep hoping that, over time, the world of gifted education will start moving that way. But then I read articles like this and realize how far we still have to go.

<end of excerpt>

The school district describes its GATE admission policy at http://www.nhusd.k12.ca.us/node/1546 .

We've gone the route of trying to get really high IQ teachers/gifted coordinators with the thought in mind, like Grinity mentions, that they'll be better able to distinguish the difference btwn truly gifted kids and high achievers and levels of giftedness. We opted to keep dd10 is a specific school last year despite the fact that she'd get more in some areas in another school b/c the first school had a highly intelligent GT teacher where the other one had a GT coordinator who struck me as of no more than average intelligence at best.

We've also done private testing rather than trying to game the CogAT which isn't the type of test that dd tends to ace although I totally understand that isn't a possibility due to cost for everyone. Right now it wouldn't be for us due to a lot of other big expenses that have come up, but we were fortunate to have been able to do so when we did.

Our district GT mentioned changes in the CogAT. Do you have any idea what they may be?

I remember hearing something about there being online and Spanish versions coming, but I have no good source.

I can see how it could become that. I think the key is to cluster kids appropriately, not to take the top whatever percent in each group and jam them all together. In a good "program", not all identified students are grouped together recieving the same things anyway, because as we know, not all gifted children are the same.

I find the idea interesting because I'm operating under the assumption that the highly race/class skewed scores we typically see do not represent a natural distribution of intelligence. Poverty, discrimination, language...these are all factors that can mask intelligence and talent. I think by looking at outliers within groups, we can better separate circumstance from intrinsic factors, and develop talent that would otherwise be overlooked. The programming itself will probably look different, at least initially. However, if identification of talent happens early on, there is opportunity to provide interventions that might overcome some of the factors that depress the test scores in underrepresented populations.

I'm also operating under the assumption that the kids we are talking about range from mildly to highly gifted (based on what I've read, group ability tests like CogAT aren't likely to capture profoundly gifted students accurately), so all identified kids shouldn't be recieving the same follow up services/instruction/intervention anyway. Part of the reason I would like more context with the scores (prepped,not prepped, etc) is to make more appropriate clustering decisions within the wider swath of kids who are on the gifted continuum. I recognize that there are brain development factors related to pre-natal care and birth to three brain development that are likely to create some skewing of intelligence. I simply don't accept that it skews it to the degree that our school based identification patterns suggest. I don't see entry into a gifted program as a prize, and I don't particularly like the concept of "program" to begin with. Rather, I see a need to make sure that all gifted kids have access to programming that meets their specific needs.

This is something I have wondered about a few times... Does it matter if the gifted ed teacher is not very gifted? I suspect the gifted ed teacher at our school thinks gifted children are wonderful and genuinely wants to help them do well, but I don't know that she "gets" it. I heard her say recently that she went to primary school with a well known PG child (you would all know the PG child in question but I don't want to reveal enough to identify her/myself/our school) and it makes me wonder how much her career path was influenced by growing up seeing someone so out there and being impressed and wanting to be near that. Does that make sense? More of a fan than a guide...

I think that giftedness comes in all shapes and sizes. I know that some of my friends are 'gifted-level' in their ability to empathise and care even though as far as I can tell or guess, they would be designated as 'bright' in an academic setting.

They get my kid, and understand his special educational needs and his alternate developmental path.

That said, I think it's as rare to find those 'heart-gifted' folks as it is to find 'IQ-gifted' folks, and my guess is that a 'mere-mortal' style gifted coordinator who didn't grow up with a whole bunch of advanced siblings and cousins and Aunts and Uncles will have a hard time faking seeing things from the perspective of an unusually gifted kid, unless she is in a school system where there are unusually gifted kids all over the place and she has learned well.

The big difference is that as adults, we specialize in our area of interest and do our jobs for years, giving us a change to learn in depth with whatever aptitude we started off with.

I often see people applying rules to situations in ways that make it clear that they are working off of a simplification of someone else's good and deep thought. For me it's much easier to make a decision if I'm working with principles of some kind, if I understand the thinking behind the rules and there reasons the rules were created. This is one of the areas of life that if I project and assume that everyone is 'like me' in this particular way, that I will make blunder after blunder.

The key is this: When I hear schools saying: "We don't do X" or "X isn't in the best interest of the student." I have to translate that in my mind into: "In my experience so far, I've never seen X happen. Please give me some tangible reasons that I can use with other people to help them understand why X needs to happen in this particular situation."

See?
Grinity

I would think it would depend on the level of giftedness. My guess is that it might matter a lot more for profoundly gifted children because their trajectory is so unique. At other levels of giftedness, I suspect that as long as the teacher is bright, knowledgeable and (perhaps giftedly) intuitive, it is not necessary that they are themselves gifted. If we take it to the other extreme, a teacher does not have to have a disability in order to effectively instruct someone with a disability--although they do have to be bright, knowledgeable and intuitive to do that well too. Teaching students who are gifted and/or have disabilities requires an ability to tune in and identify learning and emotional needs at a different level than is needed for more typically developing children. Of course we want all teachers to be bright and knowledgeable--but working with students who are gifted or who have disabilities takes a particularly high level of intuition, because these students are more likely to be at the margins of what is considered mainstream where there needs can easily be missed/overlooked.

I wonder though even at the PG level whether it matters across the board for academic learning. Perhaps it depends on how the needs are being met. If the instruction is being delivered specifically to a cluster of PG kids, I think it would be very important. If the child's needs are being met through radical acceleration, maybe it's important to have a gifted counselor to recognize and provide for social emotional needs, but not for content instruction since content instructors at upper middle/high school should be experts at the subject and level they are teaching regardless of giftedness. Thoughts?

"The other said her favorite part of the job was to take the dominating (not nec GT) kids out of the classroom and prove to them that they are not always right."

I wish they would leave that to the parents and stick to teaching. Just IMO
Eta: i apologize, that was mean.

"My thoughts are in evolution about this."
Mon that's a pretty powerful phrase you just said.
! Like !

Thanks Iucounu for your post, as it helped me think more deeply about the question.

I would add that I called the publisher of CoGat and looked at their 'test prep' booklet, asking if a parent or individual teacher could by this booklet. They explained that they only sold this to school districts.

I asked what was in the test prep booklet, and the fellow I spoke to seemed very sure that it was an introduction that would familiarize the children with the type of questions, to be sure that they understood the instructions without a lot of fuss.

I realized that 'test prep' could mean different things to different people. In some instances, checking to make sure that the child understands the directions. In other instances test prep means extensive practicing of the material that is similar (or the same) as the test questions. From my conversation with the publisher, it seemed that their idea of 'allowable test prep' was the introduction of how the questions were worded, not the material of the questions themselves. This leads me to conclude that the test materials are 'secret' although the instructions are open.

I agree that books which practice 'thinking skills' can be useful to families, as can practice of general test-taking skills depending on the circumstance.

And I do find myself very frustrated to hear reports of school districts that give more weight to group IQ tests like CoGat than to individual tests like WISC-IV.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

The site seems to be having issues, and to have lost my last reply, so this one will be shorter. Thanks for following up! I think that obviously clinches it for the CogAT, OLSAT, and NNAT-- not okay!

Are you getting at an assumption that a non-gifted adult might become highly proficient at understanding giftedness through years of teaching gifted kids? The only fear I have here is that, if GT identification in the rest of the country looks like it does in Colorado where the state now mandates that it include everything from leadership qualities to high achievement in any one academic area, a GT coordinator who is not him/herself gifted might not easily learn to distinguish btwn the large majority of kids s/he is teaching who are not gifted in the sense we use here (high IQ) and those who are.

All three of my kids took CoGat and received the same prep booklet each time from the school district -- I think that it was the K/1st grade level booklet. It gave one sample page with about 5 sample questions per subtest. It just offered an opportunity to make sure that they knew how to "fill in the bubble" and explain how the questions worked, i.e. how to finish a block matrix. All of the kids who took the test received it so it was not intended to offer an advantage. It was just to make sure they could show what they knew.

FWIW, all three of my kids missed the same sample question and it highlighted one of the weaknesses of this type of test. It asked which one of the following items would be made of leather. The desired answer was a belt. None of my kids had ever seen a leather belt. My husband doesn't wear belts and the only ones they had seen were in their dress up clothes. To them, belts had sequins and or were made of braid. (LOL) Only shoes were made of leather and that wasn't one of the options. It gave me an opportunity to discuss making educated guesses.

Knute - my DD had the exact life experience/question mismatch you describe with one of the WPPSI questions. She reasoned an answer that was true and matched her life experience and still believes herself to have answered the question correctly. But she did not get the points for it because it was not the intended answer. I actually pointed the problem out to the tester, who agreed that more and more children now would have the same problem my DD did with that question and the WPPSI was well due for re-working...