Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Ultimate "I hate Group IQ tests" thread

Hi Cricket -
You gave a great example in your post on Forum Guidelines of a topic that is important and interesting enough to have it's own thread for clarity. I hope you don't feel picked on if I quote you over here. Let's try 'treadgrafting' and see if how it goes.


BTW - what does eta stand for?

Anyway - We don't have gifted programs mandated on a state level, nor did we have any at a local level. In some way I prefer that to locals that have programs and are unwilling to accept private WISC IV or SB's as alternate identification paths. Better to have no program at all than to have one that disqualifies a child for thinking too deeply.

I just downloaded a sample to my kindle of Alternative Assessments with Gifted and Talented Students, edited by Joyce L. VanTassel-Baska, Ed.D I wonder if it will be chock-full of good ideas...

My DS's idea is one of my favorites - ask all kids if they think that they need harder school work, under polygraph testing, and send the ones who say yes for a trial to the next grade up. Repeat as needed.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

ETA in this context stands for "Edited to add"

I spent a few minutes pondering why people were indicating "Estimated Time of Arrival" in their posts when I first saw it, too.

I thought this might be about me when I saw the title! No, I don't mind you moving it here. My one issue would be with the term, "group IQ tests." None of these tests with which I am familiar (CogAT, OLSAT, etc.) purports to be an IQ test. They all actually state emphatically that they are not.

I'll find it and then come back here to add it (eta ), but someone posted an article from Renzulli, I believe, in another thread that contained a quote I loved. It was something about validity (is it measuring what we say it is).

Eta: so here it is from the thread on does achievement imply ability:


Now, to be fair, Renzulli wasn't discussing group ability tests and I'm not sure that his concept of giftedness and mine totally jibe, but his thinking did give me pause to reconsider a few issues. I'm having some cut and paste issues right now or I'd link the article's web addy here.

It is my humble opinion that tests like the CogAT and OLSAT are asking the wrong questions. I'd just as soon see straight achievement tests used b/c I don't think that these tests do any better of a job in narrowing down gifted from high achiever. It is often pooh-poohed, but I also think that, as Renzulli's article also mentions, it isn't static. Kids who are given these types of tests repeatedly wind up with their scores changing over time. There is an article (again link issues, but you can google it) called "Gifted Today but not Tomorrow" that speaks to the instability of scores on achievement and both IQ and group ability tests over time.

I'm not arguing that any of these tests are useless b/c of regression to the mean, errors of measurement, or changes in relation to your peer group due to growth spurts or periods of stagnation. I just don't care for programs that test all kids on a test that isn't even an IQ test in mid-elementary and then view that as the be all end all of the child's potential for the rest of his schooling experience.

I agree! What are they called 'as a group?'

It is my humble opinion that tests like the CogAT and OLSAT are asking the wrong questions. I'd just as soon see straight achievement tests used b/c I don't think that these tests do any better of a job in narrowing down gifted from high achiever.[/quote]

I agree, and perhaps it would be fun to give above level achievement tests to see who is sort of doing 90th percentile work on grade-level achievement tests and also doing 90th percentile or above on one or two years ahead of grade level achievement tests.

In some way this kid needs gifted services more than the kid who achieves 99th percentile on 'at grade' achievement test but only 50-70% on the test for the next grade up.

I personally don't think that any school is every going to meet the needs of all kids with only one type of intervention for gifted kids. Sort of like thinking that handicap ramps are going to met the need of every kid with physical disabilities until a child breaks their writing arm and needs to wear a cast for 6 weeks. Those ramps aren't going to help her one bit.

Strangly, my son once mentioned that he and a few other kids were being pulled out to take NCLB tests that are normally given to kids in an older grade. I think it was in 2nd grade before Giftedness was really on my radar. When I asked him why, he said that the school wanted to see how prepared they are, but when I asked which kids were in this special grouping, I suspected that it was all bright kids. I never heard anything about it from the school and I never asked. I would have thought that they would have mentioned it to me. ((shrug))

ETA: Is this the article 'gifted today not tomorrow?'
http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/EJ746292.pdf
Here's a link to a Renzulli article -
http://www.gifted.uconn.edu/sem/semart13.html

Love and More Love,
Grinity

I believe that the publishers call them school ability tests or group ability tests. I guess that this just makes it a matter of semantics in that "ability" and "intelligence" may be different ways of saying the same thing. However, the FAQs for the CogAT state:


I don't know quite what it is they are aspiring to measure, honestly, b/c there are correlation studies btwn IQ tests and tests like the CogAT. If they aren't aiming to measure the same thing (intelligence), I don't know why they even look @ the correlation.

Yep, that's it.

Since I just had a graduate course that dealt a lot with this subject, I thought I'd chime in.

Tests such as the CogAT are group ability or aptitude tests. The testmakers will go to great lengths to distance themselves from IQ, but in reality IQ is the construct that it was designed to measure. In fact, it has over 80% validity measuring the construct of intelligence (concurrent validity when compared to the individual tests such as WISC), which is pretty good. That being said, 80% leaves for a lot of error, and I think the standard error of measurement is around 10 pts (don't quote me on that but I'm sure we could look it up).

There is rightly a lot of animosity for tests like the CogAT on this board, but this comes from its misuse. The CogAT is an extremely valuable test when it is used properly. First, it should be used as to screen the entire population of students. Again, don't quote me (it's amazing how soon this info disappears...) but I think the CogAT costs schools about 1/100th or maybe even 1/1000th of an individual WISC. The reason it should be used to screen is because it adds some objectivity to the question of who gets to go for the full testing. Mind you, teachers and parents should absolutely still be able to nominate students for testing as well. It simply helps to identify more truly gifted students (particularly in cases with poor school performance, little parent advocacy etc), and that's not a bad thing!

The second appropriate use of the CogAT is to gauge student performance compared to ability. Our district gives both the CogAT and the ITBS (achievement test) and develops reports that compare the two. If there is a great discrepancy between ability and achievement, that raises a red flag that perhaps something is wrong. Maybe the teacher is not getting through to the student, or maybe a learning disability is involved.

CogAT results should definitely not be used as a requirement for gifted services. I would be in favor of an either/or approach (maybe because DD7 is a high CogAT girl ) but not an all-of-the-above. CogAT is simply not as accurate as an individual IQ test, especially it seems for HG students. From many of your stories, it's obvious that some schools are misusing the CogAT as a gatekeeper test, and that is just a shame.

Kerripat, since you seem to have studied this a bit, I have a question. I have seen studies like you mention that show somewhere around an 80% relationship btwn WISC scores and CogAT scores, but I've never seen any data where they took out kids who scored very highly on one or the other and looked to see if the relationship was still that high.

I wonder with all of the stories of high WISC scoring kids who test much lower on the CogAT if the relationship is still that high as kids move very far away from the mean. Do you know if that has ever been studied? I did see one study that is linked on Hoagies that found a negative correlation with IQ on the OLSAT for highly gifted kids whereas there was a strong positive correlation with IQ for average kids or when the entire population was included not just kids who are far from the mean.

I do love the idea of CogAT being used as a screener to overcome teacher-bias about 'who needs more advanced work,' and the discrepancy check idea is laudable. Your school district seems amazing.

I wish there was a 'wall of shame' somewhere on the CogAT site where school districts who were mis-using the test could be reported and someone from the publisher would send them angry letters...afterall, those districts are detracting from the reputation of these 'group ability tests.'

80% is a sort of interesting number, as I wonder what the correlation between straight up achievement tests and out of level tests are. This seems like really important information that would help school make researched based decisions on their gifted program entry procedures. Of course many school folks don't like individual IQ test scores - they just don't seem to 'square' with what a child 'looks like' in the classroom. Which might tell us a lot about our classrooms, or maybe something about IQ tests. Or just the difference between 1st graders and 10th graders. Lots to think about here.

And excellent point about having a 80% agreement over the thick part of the bell curve doesn't say anything about what's going on at +2SD and +3SD.

So hard to not assume that one.

Smiles,
Grinity

cricket2 and Grinity - As far as assessment goes, 80% is that magic number that test makers look for. I think the CogAT is even a little over 80%, and that is pretty much the best you can ask for. The SAT and ACT would have similar numbers for predictive validity (in terms of college performance).

I think that the 80% validity is overall, but that this may translate to greater validity for within 2SDs , with >2SD having much weaker, or even negative, correlation. I don't know if they have studies about the tail ends of the distribution, but I didn't find anything on a quick search. From the stories on here, it seems like it might be due to some out-of-the-box thinking going on with those HG kids.

I think that the CogAT is also a good measure of predicted academic achievement in a totally normal at-grade class setting. So the kids who score high on the CogAT are probably going to be great students and high-achievers, without (necessarily) needed any intervention. They might not think so differently than would be expected for their age, so they are not going to have to wonder which answer the teacher wants. Sometimes having a gifted brain (I know from experience) lets you see the possibilities in all of the answers, so it takes some maturity, experience, or even a separate skill set to pick the right one for the right reasons.

DD7's situation with a high CogAT (139) and a much lower WISC GAI (121) seems to be much less common that the other way around. In fact, I haven't found any other parents complaining about it online at all! I personally wish that my school district would take a look at DD7's quantitative CogAT score (150-ceiling) and would allow her to accelerate in math. They do let a small group of kids do this in 3rd grade, and I'm hoping that they will let her participate next year, regardless of her gifted status at that time. I don't know...I'm still thinking about having her tested again privately, maybe with the SB-V. She is so primed for accelerated math learning (she always complains of math in school being boring because they go so slow, she takes in new concepts super-quickly, etc) and she is also a very strong reader (about 5th grade when she was in 1st, has been reading great above-level books all summer) and all-around good student. In her case, I would just like to have her in the enrichment program, because I think it would make school much more interesting for her.

Thanks Kerripat - I think that's a good insight into the gifted brain vs. CogAT.

It seems to me that testing your DD's Math ability against local 'scope and sequence' tests is the gold standard.
If the school wants something more official, take a look at
http://www.idealsolutionsmath.com/
They take the data from
ITBS ACT EXPLORE IAAT (Iowa Algebra Aptitude Test)
and turn it into a boilerplate/official documentation for 'needs math acceleration.'

Many schools that I've seen/heard about don't care 2 bits for IQ tests. But if you live in a place where Explore is normally given to 8th graders and can show that your DD does as well as the 50% percentile of them, that will probably make their eyes pop a bit.

Anyway, the general principle is to 'speak your schools language' whatever the local language happens to be - SAT, Explore, MAP, State achievement tests, CogAT, end of year tests, or worksheet in her own handwriting.

One never knows what a school will decide. When we asked for a single subject acceleration in math early 4th grade, the school administered WISC, and WJ, and in the end said "No." Why? They said that when their district math specialist sat down with him she judged that he 'wasn't a deep thinker in math.' What did they do together that gave her this idea? Soduku puzzles.

I'm pretty sure I can document that she was wrong - as a 14 year old 9th grader he completed Algebra 2 with a 95% average this year, and was his teacher's favorite student because 'he's not arrogant like the other kids who are ahead in math.'

((shrugs and more shrugs))
Grinity