Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Abilities vs. Achievment Testing

My DD is 6 and in kindergarten. She took the ITBS and CogAt. Her ITBS scores were 99th percentile in reading, 83rd percentile in vocabulary and (I think...going off memory) 68th percentile in math.

Her Cogat scores were horrible. Her verbal score was below the 50th percentile. Her highest score was in the non-verbal section, I believe it was around the 70th percentile. Sorry, I don't have the exact scores in front of me.

She did not qualify for gifted services. The GT specialist said we could meet to discuss the scores if we requested it. Would you meet with the GT specialist? I especially curious about a kid who gets 99% on reading on the ITBS but below 5oth percent on the CogAt.

Any advice going forward? She can not take the CogAt again for 2 years. Should I prep her this time and retest in 2nd grade?

Ability and achievement tests really aren't testing the same thing. Deborah Ruf, who is an expert in testing of gifted children summed it up well in an article that is being discussed in a recent thread here, "The WPPSI-IV Technical Manual points out what many of us know, too, that achievement scores often have more to do with exposure and opportunity and don’t necessarily identify intellectually gifted children."

That said, I really hate the CogAT and wish that people, including the aforementioned Dr. Ruf, wouldn't refer to tests like the CogAT and OLSAT as "group IQ tests" b/c the test publishers have stated pretty clearly that their tests are not intelligence or IQ tests and are not meant to be used as such despite the frequency with which they are.

Would the district consider outside testing? Can you afford to have your dd take an individual IQ test like the WISC or SB-V?

I think that you've got two possibilities here:

1) your dd is a high achiever but not gifted and, yes, I have seen kids score in the 99th percentile on achievement tests and have dead average IQ scores
2) your dd is gifted and the group test is a poor fit for her. I've also seen this particularly with divergent thinking gifted kids and highly gifted kids who may come up with answers that are more complex than the test designer had in mind with their multiple choice test.

Thanks for the reply Cricket. I guess I do need to meet with the GT coordinator to see if they accept outside testing. The GT program at her school is a once a week pull out program.

I guess at this point, I'm wondering if it is worth paying money for or if we should try again with the group testing in a few years. Do you think her group test scores might change in a few years or are bad scores on group testing now likely to remain the same?

Our primary reasons for testing DD were high achievement plus emotional sensitivity and perfectionism, which I thought GT might be able to help us with.

Sorry, I haven't been online here much so I'm slow in replying. I guess that whether it is worth the money for outside testing depends on whether it will open doors for your dd that might otherwise be closed and that really need to be open and also whether you have other indications that she is gifted beyond the high reading achievement on the ITBS.

In regard to the former, it sounds like your GT program isn't that robust, but does it become better later and would being in the program now make it more likely that she'd get into the later programming?

Regarding other signs of giftedness, I guess that I'd want to know if you have a family history of giftedness with people who've had actual IQ tests done not just group screeners or some other strong indicator such as qualification for groups like Mensa or something like that. I'd also look for other more objective signs b/c I do find that the personality signs of giftedness are much like the square/rectangle analogy: a lot of gifted kids may be intense, sensitive, perfectionists, etc., but all sensitive, perfectionistic, intense kids aren't gifted.

What did her milestones look like as a young child, particularly those that are not motor skill related as walking early, etc. is less correlated with intelligence than, say, talking early? I'm not necessarily expecting you to list that all out for us, but am just putting it out there as stuff to think about in getting a feel for whether the money will be well spent confirming something you already know to some extent vs. something you suspect but are less sure about.

I hope that all makes sense!

Regarding whether the group test scores will come out the same - who knows! People certainly do prep for those tests and see scores bumps from doing so and you could do that. However, the kids who I've seen, anecdotally, who are pretty consistent on group tests are high achieving, in the box thinking kids who are not necessarily gifted and who are prepped for the types of questions they are going to get as well as truly average kids. As someone else mentioned on your other thread, HG+ kids can be a lot more erratic on group tests and get much lower scores than their IQ scores.

I, personally, only have one child who has ever taken the CogAT and she only took it once, so I don't have a good pool of gifted kids for whom I know the scores. I do know more about the kids who were close to getting in to our GT programming and had to be retested b/c they didn't quite make it and they fall more into the category I mentioned above: had been prepped before the first testing, fell a bit short and were retested and made it the second or third time with more prep. They are high achiever kids who fit the school expectations well, but not really gifties. All bets are off when dealing with a gifted kid, especially one who has already tested lower than his/her ability on a group test b/c that is a good sign that something didn't work out the first time and just hothousing the material might not be enough to bump him/her over the line the second time like it might for a more typical kid who knows how to color inside the lines better, so to speak.

I don't know if it's worth meeting with the gifted specialist, because I honestly think there is a good chance that she'll just assume you're a delusional parent who mistakenly believes her child is gifted. That said, if you think your child is gifted, please don't let CoGAT scores change your mind!!! The scores ABSOLUTELY can change. I've had different experiences with each of my kids. My ds13's scores in 1st grade on the OLSAT make your dd's scores look like those of Einstein. Really. He had under 20% on the non-verbal. This is a kid who made it to state in Mathcounts this year, rocked the SATs in 6th grade, top 2% on AMC, etc (and he now routinely does really, really well on group ability testing). I KNEW he was gifted, but wow, the test scores really didn't show it. The next year, he easily made it into gifted. Some of my kids seemed to always score well and others seemed to think way, way too much when they were doing it and took a few years to hit their stride. But, they *can* be taught. And I'm not saying test prepped, necessarily or killed with flash cards, etc.. But, I found that once I talked to the kids about how some of the tests worked and what kind of things they were looking for, thing really did improve. With ds, we did do a little prep on the nonverbal part. We found he had a really, really hard time imagining things spatially in his head, and so we got a few computer games from the Critical Thinking Co and he played around with them, and we bought a few other spatial things, and voila, in almost no time he caught on and surpassed everyone else. Personally, I don't know why people get so crazy about test prep. Ds is very black and white and the whole idea of turning something in his head/imagination, or folding a piece of paper up without actually holding it, seemed to bother him. One of my girls had lots of trouble with analogies, back in the day when they still had them on a lot of tests. I swear it was overthinking. I taught her a few tricks and ways to categorize and she never had a problem again. Personally, I think that the group tests don't usually show a kid as very gifted if they're not at least mildly gifted but definitely miss some kids who are very gifted. CoGAT specifically says that they are not meant to test really gifted kids.
You know your daughter and you're probably the best judge of how gifted she is and where she needs to be. But, given that it's only a once-a-week program, it probably won't matter too much if she enters now or in second grade. Don't be discouraged or second guess yourself as to her abilities.

This isn't totally relevant to the point at hand, but I'm not sure that I totally agree on this for two reasons. I do agree that gifted, and particularly HG+ and 2e, kids can easily be missed on group tests.

However, I personally know two kids who've taken the WISC IQ test more than once and had clearly average scores both times save for higher than average memory and processing speed indices and both hit the 95th percentile in one area on the CogAT scores needed for GT ids where I live. We also see around 15+% of our local kids testing as "gifted" using that 95th percentile bar on the CogAT even in our district that isn't unusually high performing and which I'd be willing to bet a lot isn't populated with an unusual number of gifted kids. We also have a lot of test prep going on for higher achieving kids, though, too and kids whose parents want the GT id. I really do think that the prep can artificially inflate scores for bright or typical kids.

For really out of the box thinkers, I'm not sure if it would be as easy to prep them into higher scores, though.

That makes sense. I guess when I think really gifted, I'm thinking of kids who score in the very top (145 and up maybe) and I do think that not a lot of average (even prepped) kids score there. But yes, I guess I do agree that if the kids are really prepped, the CoGAT will be skewed to a certain extent. It's unfortunate because I think in some areas they are now requiring very, very high scores on group gifted tests and it will miss some smart, unprepped kids but let in more bright prepped kids.

I have seen this as well. I can say if failed to show the level of gifted in my DS. He made the GT cut but the standard scores on CogAt were off from individual testing on WISC-IV. He still tested GT on CogAT just not PG on it.

I have never heard of CogAT saying it is not specifically meant for IDing GT kids. Every district I know that uses it for that exact purpose. That's crazy if the publisher is stating that and districts are using it anyway.

I agree with the point made earlier that achievement test results are only a function of exposure. I think that they are very unfair.

A very bright kid that hasn't been exposed (for socio-ecomonic or any other reasons) is unfairly dinged by them in my opinion. It also allows not so bright kids whose parents have deep pockets to prep the bejeesus out of them so that they just squeeze over the GT bar.

All in all they seem to stack the deck against kids from less affluent families getting public GT places - the very places that ought to be helping them overcome their less privileged backgrounds.

I'd agree that prepping an average kid into looking PG probably isn't going to happen and I don't even know if group tests have ceilings that high anyway. I am think more along the lines of it being possible for an average or slightly brighter than average kid to look mildly gifted with prep or even the right amount of convergent thinking on a group test.