Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Question about CoGat nonverbal

My daughter was just placed in Program Challenge, which is our schools gifted services. She is now entering second grade, she is 6 going to turn 7. We have never doubted she was gifted. We were just waiting for her maturity to catch up to her peers before testing her, because we were unsure how she would do on their "motivation" requirement. She was a preemie, born in August and her adjusted birthdate put her with a late September birthdate. So, she is a year ahead in school since they don't look at adjusted dates. I hope this makes sense.

Anyhow, they decided to test her last spring, but the testing administrator was out on maternity leave. What resulted was different county teachers who were certified to administer coming to the school to give parts of the test. None of us knew when the kids would be tested. It was very random, there was no practice exercises, I didn't know what the testing looked like, etc. in other words, I have heard parents prep their kids for these things, and we did no such thing. We had just sold our house and bought a new one. We were packing and unpacking and moving to another home.

Excuse me for all of that rambling!

So, here are the tests she took:
CoGat for mental ability
Terra Nova for achievement
Divergent feeling scale/divergent thinking scale (?) for creativity
GES/Hawthorne for motivation

When the regular teacher returned from maternity leave, she told me that my daughter was exceptionally gifted, because she had qualified in all four areas of testing, that this was extremely rare, and she had entire areas of the test where she did not miss any questions.

So, we get the results, and are confused by one battery, and what it means in relation to her other scores. Make no mistake, I have known this child was gifted since she was around a year old, I just don't understand what this one score means in terms of her potential, or if this one test is even valid. We did not know the CoGat was to be administered the day it was, we were moving that day, she slept in the new house on a mattress on the floor and went to bed at almost 1 a.m. With testing at 7 the next morning. Ack!

CoGat: (option a 99 composite, option b 96%+ on any one component)
Verbal 97%
Quantitative: 99%
Nonverbal: 69%
Composite: 98%

Terra Nova: (minimum 90%in at least one sub-test below)
Total reading: 99%
Total math: 95%

Creativity Divergent feeling/thinking (minimum of 90%)
93%

GES/Hawthorne (minimum of 90%)
>99%

OK. What does the 69 on the nonverbal mean in relationship to her other scores? I have been reading about the nonverbal test, and it seems some places use it alone to test for gifted, and some use in conjunction, and some say it is not beneficial on its own and must be used in conjunction. Apparently our state doesn't seem to out much weight in the score here in relation to the others, as when she started her new school this week, the gifted teacher here was well wanted to tell me how high her scores were, and how rare it was to see a child her age and as young as she is in relation to her peers score gifted in all four areas. They expect to see three areas to be deemed eligible for Program Challenge.

Sorry so wordy. I actually had an enjoyable afternoon yesterday googling and reading about the different tests they administered and what they looked for.

Not sure anyone here is interested in MBTI, but I am N INFJ and my husband is an INTP.

Something came to me last night. It's been a long time since I was in the gifted program in school. I have been IQ tested several times because my family moved frequently . I wa snot given group tests, I was tested by a psychologist. And also, if you want a laugh, it was suspected as a child (89) that I had OCD and this was at a time when the primary thought was that only males had OCD and, only those with high IQs. So, since I presented as a female (ha) they administered an IQ test to me before confirming my OCD diagnoses. . But back to my own tests. I recall on group administered state testing I also did poorly on the nonverbal section, but frequently had the highest scores in the school aside from this marker. I remember the last school I went into the gifted program at, the teachers at the conference told my parents they suspected I had an undiagnosed learning disability, but since I compensated so well, they were ignoring it. I was given a range the last time I was formally tested, it was 135 to 150. Perhaps they gave my mother the exact number, they did not give it to me.

I'm not sure what all of it means. Have you talked with the person who administered the test? She did a great job on the other sections.

I was told by our child psychologist that the Verbal sections are a good indicator of future academic success. We are fairly new to all of this as well. Hopefully someone who has more experience can help!
Good luck!

Percentiles bug me because we tend to be a bit wired to think about completion and school grade percentages which mean completely different things than percentiles which place a score within a population. 69% means she scored better than 69% of the other kids her age who took that section of the test.

When you translate 69% to a standard score, you get: 108
Trnaslating 97% to standard you get: 128
and 99% to 135

Functionally, it would mean she has more aptitude for language and quantitative reasoning than for visual and spatial reasoning. Does that match your own observations?

A compounding factor would be if there is an early learning effect, like if she started doing math and reading earlier due to instruction, those scores could be bumped up some particularly at that age. It seems far less common for kids to get direct instruction in nonverbal skills. That is one reason some places use nonverbal alone as a theoretically more socio-economic fair measure.

My DS had an IQ test at 6.11 and skewed similarly with high scores in verbal and quantitative areas and lower scores across the board for nonverbal skills. He has a vision problem that was actively being corrected at the time and seems to have had lasting effects on visual interpretation and searching and a few other areas. But his internal visualization skills are more developed than he can demonstrate in a test. So, if those results don't match your instincts I'd definitely look at having good vision testing; if we had realized to check, we would've easily spotted DS' issue ourselves by just having him cover his left eye and try to do anything with his right eye alone.

Zen, I had four children in a span of twelve months time (two sets of twins, twelve months apart in age). I did not have time to do any early learning, and did an unschooling approach when they were small. I did start supplementing once they all entered public school, because they all were bored at school. My husband and I are both cross dominant, being left eyed and right handed, which is correlated to multiple learning disorders, however, I don't know that she has one. We do suspect two of my boys have a learning disorder. Reading that ruff-estimate, she fits the criteria for 4. I was still getting up every three hours around the clock when she was 15-18 months old and we told her pediatrician she was spelling CVC words, dialing the telephone numbers I shouted out to her while feeding the little twins, and speaking in full sentences with about a three hundred word vocabulary. We did not know this was unusual, I was asking her pediatrician if her brother was delayed because he only had fifty words and was not speaking in sentences yet. Ha.

One more comment... These results confuse me because of two gifted staff teachers telling me how "rare" and "exceptional" my daughter was based in these test results, when, IMO, the nonverbal battery was kinda sucky. I was told she was the only child admitted to gifted from the group of first graders they tested as well. Everyone was jumping up and down about her scores Nd raving how she was gifted in all four areas, and for her age this was rare, rare, rare, and I am thinking "what's up with that nonverbal?". I think I will ask about it. They are scheduled to the the cogat again in a month, I could just wait and see what happens if she takes it on more than six hours sleep.

Oh, and she has never been supplemented in math. I have yet to grasp how to teach common core math, so I never supplemented it. Her supplementation has been to write short stories when she finished her homework early.

I wouldn't agree with the comment that "the nonverbal battery was kinda sucky." A score in the 69th percentile is in the normal range, and your DD was exceptional in every other measure.

Where the administration is going bonkers is that your DD took a battery of four different tests, each measuring very different things, and in each of those four, she met the qualifying criteria for gifted services.

So Dude, this is my OCD playing out, and I should just be excited about the other scores and let the nonverbal go? That would be cool.

LOL... yes, that would be my advice.

It could have been that she was too tired for the harder non-verbal stuff. Since she is in the gifted programme it doesn't really matter at this point. Relax and be happy.