Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment NWEA vs CogAt

Hi, I have on and offed browsed this forum for a few years. I have a nine year old who is very bright and possibly gifted. He is very interested and motivated in math in particular and once in a while he will do something that really impresses me in this area (and has since he was very young.) His NWEA scores have never been super impressive. They are between the 80th and 95th depending on the year. He does have an A+ in math, in an accelerated group and complains of being bored.

We have moved to a new school, they asked to screen him using the CogAt and the GT teacher is impressed so far. She has not completed all the sections but has done what she calls the math section and abstract reasoning. She said he had an almost perfect score in the "math" part and scored very highly on the other section as well. She has taken him on in the interim for GT until she completes the rest of the test.

Is it typical that a child will have a high CogAt score and not have it translate into high NWEA scores? In the past, even though I feel the schools don't challenge/develop him in math I have been hesitant to bring it up because of the low NWEA scores. I was in GT as a kid, and know that 95th percentile is what they usually want. I was actually removed in fifth grade when my scores on the CAT tests dropped below this. It was hurtful and I don't want to set my son up to be disappointed.

I really just want to be able to use the CogAt test result to help advocate for differentiated instruction in math. The GT program is just a pull out program once a week.

Welcome!

NWEA MAP is an achievement test designed mainly for progress monitoring. CogAT is an aptitude test used to predict learning ability, and is supposed to be less vulnerable to differences in instruction. Performance on achievement tests, especially in mathematics, is very much a function of access to high-level instruction. Even a very bright little person shouldn't be expected to have to independently re-derive high-level math principles in order to achieve in the top percentiles on material to which they have had no exposure.

So at the simplest level, it is possible that your child has not performed above a particular percentile just because of the range of topics in which he has received instruction. Some children also find the CogAT reasoning tasks more engaging (as they are like puzzles), while math problems may feel like drudgery, even if (especially if) they are easy, which can lead to careless errors.

Finally, once you reach the top few percentiles, the fineness of discrimination really isn't there. Even on an adaptive test, it's difficult to distinguish between 95th and 99th percentile in only 35 multiple choice items.

I would withhold judgement until the GT teacher completes her testing. It sounds like she is an advocate for him already, particularly in math (quantitative reasoning and nonverbal reasoning are probably the sections she has completed) so a small difference in the numbers is unlikely to change her attitude to him that easily.

A drop in my DD's MAP scores are what clued us in to just how understimuated she has been at school. She's was identified gifted when we moved to the district using the NNAT and later the CogAT, and initially her MAP scores were in the 99%tile. But as school became too slow for her, she got bored... and ultimately lazy in math. We saw her MAP drop to the 86%tile at one point which was a big wake up call to us that something needed to be done. DD9 got a little bit of extra challenge in the classroom and as much as we could at home, and BAM! Her MAP climbed up to the 98%tile in just a couple of months.

So I wouldn't put as much stock in the MAP scores as I would in other testing. But maybe those scores can be used as data to determine if he's bored or getting the challenge he needs.

When my son was in second grade, he was tested for what was hoped to be a brand-new G&T program. He scored an overall 98th %ile on the CogAT, but only 72nd on ELA and 90th on the math section of the achievement test they used. He scored in the 20th percentile on Social Studies -- because in a struggling school, second grade social studies was not exactly a priority! Basically, he could only do as well on the achievement test as the material he'd been exposed to.

So I'm with the others, don't worry about the NWEA. If the GT teacher thinks he'll benefit from the GT offerings, then that's super! Hopefully he can keep exploring his love of math.