Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Cue the Tom Petty...

Well, 99 percentile on math for five years old is not kind of cry for help, situation might change dramatically for the next two years. For example, my DS10 was an early learner and tested above 90 percentile for 4th grade math at age 5. OTOH, my DS7 was busy designing spacecrafts and building complex models. He had little interest in reading&math and was well below 50 percentile at age 5. But he made a couple of surprise leaps once he started reading and arithmetic in first grade, and now tested above 95 percentile. Both of them were in the regular school without gifted class option for K to 2.

I gather that the composite of the three indices (nonverbal, verbal, and quantitative) on the Cogat need to total up to a rarity of 98th percentile, not that both need to be there and also that he didn't make it to the CogAT testing b/c he wasn't high enough on the achievement testing. (That is, of course, assuming that I am reading this right!)

I know that I am biased as the parent of a 2e kid, but I also really think that the validity of GT identification (as in, are we testing what we proclaim to be testing: whether the kid is gifted) is really questionable when we rely to heavily on achievement and group tests that just don't seem to have great convergent validity with the WISC in particular.

I know that these group tests have been validity tested and supposedly line up well with IQ tests, but I've seen over and over not only underestimation of gifted kids, but overestimation of more average kids (not what I'm implying with the OP's kiddo at all and it doesn't even sound like he got to the CogAT piece). The publisher of the CogAT has addressed this issue a few times in what hasn't been a fully satisfactory manner at least for me. See, for example:

http://www.riversidepublishing.com/products/group/cogat6/pdfs/newsletters/CS_vol1_summer04.pdf