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.
