Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment CogAT test preparation: Which is the best?

I've requested to have my daughter re-tested for the CogAT in the fall because they tested her without giving us a chance to prepare. There are books for it but I wonder if there are other options available.

They did that because you are not meant to prepare for it... other than a good night's sleep, I suppose.

We had a long thread about this in the past. There are prep questions promulgated by the publisher, but they are just a few, designed just to familiarize test takers with the question format, and designed to be administered by the tester, not parents. You're not supposed to crib for the CogAT.

Ditto! You don't prep for these type of test.

If you feel that the test is an underestimation of your dd's ability, I'd be more inclined to have her retested on an actual IQ test than retested on a group test. Would the school take outside test scores, can you afford to do IQ testing, and/or would the school be willing to administer a true IQ test (they'd need a licensed person such as a psychologist to do so)?

I highly doubt that they'll retest her on the CogAT. It's poor testing practice to retest students (or adults) with the same instrument after such a short amount of time has passed. They may give her a different IQ test, but I can't see them agreeing to give her the CogAT again, so "prepping" her for that is a waste of time.

As others have said, prepping kids in any way for ANY type of standardized test isn't necessary. The test is normed against other kids who didn't receive any type of advance preparation or practice. An individual test may give you more info and a slightly more reliable score, but practice and prep isn't necessarily and can even be harmful because kids feel more "pressure" to perform when they take the actual test.

I agree with the other posters. Given that the CogAT is a group test, it might help to do an individual test.

My son recently took a test that can't be prepped for, beyond a few practice questions that the publisher provides. The practice questions helped a lot, because they told him what kind of format to expect and also reduced anxiety. But prepping by using a big book or a course wouldn't have helped.

It probably depends on the school and you're right that it is poor testing practice to do so. However, I do know of at least one GT coordinator local to me who has given kids the CogAT, OLSAT, and then the CogAT again within a matter of months when they missed the 95th percentile on one area cut-off for our GT programming. I'd agree that the scores are highly suspect at that point, but it does happen depending on the school.

What I'd remind myself is that the goal is ultimately to ascertain the child's needs and the right placement for the child not to get a high enough score to reach some artificial cut-point for a program. It gets hard, though, when others are prepping, retesting, etc. and it becomes such that other kids of similar ability are placed in programming for which they, ultimately, don't qualify either. That tends to leave the regular classrooms with kids with less pushy parents and lower achieving kids, which may not be a good fit depending on your child.

Thank you all for your input. Let me first state that I am not a pushy parent (I'm a concerned and involved parent) and I find it rather unkind to use the word cribbing for my attempt to just familiarize my child with the question format, a format that is not part of the regular curriculum. There will be 1 year and 9 months in between the 2 tests. I agree with Cricket2 that my goal is to ascertain my child's needs and the right placement for my daughter, not to get a high enough score to reach a cut-point for a program! She is in the higher percentiles (that's what her NNAT test showed as well) and I would like to make sure that if she qualifies that she can at least participate in the part-time AAP program if not the full level 4 program. I like the suggestion of an individual test as well.

There are many ways of "preparing" for a test. In my children's school, every child was prepped the week before the test. They were given a description and sample of every problem type so they could learn what would be expected of them and ask questions in time to clear up any potentially disastrous misconceptions. Not only do I not see any harm in this, I think that it diminishes distortions created by cram schools and leads to test results that better reflect ability instead of familiarity. Did your daughter's peers have a similar "chance to prepare" that she did not?