Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment How many 1st graders score 99% composite on CogAT?

My first grade, 6 year old daughter scored 99% composite on CogAT: with a 9B(Q+) profile. I'm new to all of this, but from reading the profile information on the CogAT website I'm a bit intimidated by all that they suggest she may need by way of additional/accelerated learning. She automatically qualifies to be in the state Gifted program (starting next year) b/c of this composite score, on top of her MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) scores.

Her age % ranks were Verbal 99, Quanititative 99 and NonV 96.

Does this score really mean she is in the top 1% of first graders in the country? Thanks for feedback.

On this test, yes, she would be in the top 1% of first graders in the country. To put that in perspective, the top 1% is 1 out of 100 students, so if you've got a school of 500 students, in a normal distribution 5 of them would fall at that same point. It is a very good score.

Thanks so much. I think she is a great kid and obviously I'm very proud of her, but wow, the language they use to explain the CogAT profiling is a bit much for first grade. I think I'll take all of these test results with a grain of salt and let her be herself and see how she grows. Without a lot of feedback this year from her teacher, I'm mostly left with these scores to figure out how she is doing and then wondering what more I should be doing for her. So basically I know it's a good score, but is it so good that I should be doing some additional testing on her? The school requires that she take a Torrance test for creativity for gifted, but beyond that, nothing. I just don't know.

Sorry, so I guess I'm wondering, do parents of kids with this kind of score normally also do an IQ test? Does having that information help? Are there other tests I should know about?

Thanks.

I'm not sure on that one. We've done both with my dd10 and her IQ scores were significantly higher than her CogAT scores but her CogAT scores weren't nearly as high as your dd's. And, thanks Dottie for the further info. I don't feel chastised .

My thought would be that I'd tentatively assume that she's gifted to some degree but not put a pin on the board as to where exactly that falls at this point. Even kids who are retested on the CogAT or other school ability tests tend to see some changes from year to year and sometimes significant changes. If she seems to be performing significantly above grade level and you cannot get appropriate acceleration for her with the scores you already have, I'd consider further testing then.

We have one child for whom we probably don't have a really good pinpoint as to where she falls in terms of the gifted spectrum but my bets would be on HG. Her one ability test was an IQ test done at age 7 after coming out of a really bad prior school year. She froze, refused to do parts of the test at all, and generally had wildly erratic #s across the test, but she was still somewhere in the gifted range. We were told to retest her later, but we never have. Her achievement since then has been so high that she's gotten mostly what she's needed without further testing.