Reading Your Child’s Cognitive Abilities Test Profile

Bonnie O’ReganAdvanced Learning Program Facilitator

Greenwich Public SchoolsFebruary 5, 2014 (snowdate: February 18, 2014)

CogAT: Cognitive Abilities Test

What is it?

What information does it give us?

How can we use this information?

• Comprehending problem situations

• Detecting similarities and differences

• Making inferences

• Making deductions

• Classifying and categorizing objects, events, and other stimuli

• Creating and adapting problem-solving strategies

• Using familiar concepts and skills in new contexts

CogAT measures important reasoning skills:

Cognitive Abilities Test

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CogAT measures three different cognitive abilities:

Cognitive Abilities Test

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Verbal Battery Quantitative Battery NonVerbal Battery

Measures flexibility, fluency, and adaptability in reasoning with verbal materials and in solving verbal problems

Measures flexibility and fluency in working with quantitative symbols and concepts and the student’s ability to discover relationships and to figure out a rule or principle that explains them

Measures fluency and flexibility in reasoning with shapes and visual patterns. Facilitates the assessment of English learners or students whose verbal or mathematical experiences are limited.

CogAt and IQ

Cognitive Abilities Test

• The CogAT is NOT an IQ test, but is a test of reasoning which is one of the variforms of intelligence

• It has a .79 correlation to IQ. The closer to 1.0 the better the correlation, so it has high correlation

• Reasoning abilities have substantial correlations with learning and problem solving, both in and out of school

Cognitive Abilities Test

Verbal Ability – Best predictor of academic success

Quantitative Ability – “number sense” ability to see relationship of numbers

Nonverbal Ability – Best predictor of how fast a student learns

Raw Scores• Number of Items = the number of

questions on the subtests.• Number Att. (attempted) = the

number of questions the student answered.

• Number Correct = the total number of items the student answered correctly.

The CogAT allows comparisons of the performance of students with the performance of other students in the nation of the same age who took the same test.

Standard Age Score(SAS)

Cognitive Level SAS Range

Very High 128-150+

Above Average 112-127

Average 89-111

Below Average 73-88

Very Low 50-72

Stanines

Description Stanine RangeVery High 9

Above Average 7-8

Average 4-6

Below Average 2-3

Very Low 1

Understanding Percentile Ranks

Juan’s results on a Verbal battery places him 88h from the bottom of his age mates.

Juan, as an example, is a student in a group of exactly 100 students also 7.9 years old.

A common way to evaluate a student’s performance is to compare it with the performances of some group.

Because there are 100 students in his group, one can then say that Juan performed as well as or better than 88 percent of his classmates.

Top of the class

Bottom of the group

The 88 is a PERCENTILE RANK because it represents a relative standing, i.e., it identifies what percentage of Juan’s age mates scored the same as or lower than him.

88th

The CogAT allows comparisons of the performance of students with the performance of other students in the nation of the same grade who took the same test at the same time of year.

Juan’s results on a Verbal battery places him 88th from the bottom of his age mates and 89th from the bottom of his grade mates

Top of the class

Bottom of the national group

88th89th

Understanding Local Percentile Ranks

Now, Juan is only being compared to about 650 Grade 2 students in GPS.

Juan’s performance on the verbal battery equaled or exceeded the performances of 52 percent of Grade 2 students locally.

Even though Juan scored at the 89th national percentile rank on the Verbal Battery, he will have a different local percentile rank because he is being compared to a different group of students

Top of the district

Bottom of the district

58th

Standard Age Score(SAS)

Cognitive Level National

SAS Range

Greenwich

SAS Range

Very High 128-150+ 139-150+

Above Average 112-127 129-138

Average 89-111 110-128

Below Average 73-88 95-109

Very Low 50-72 73-94

Greenwich

National

70 80 90 100 110 120 130 140

Cognitive Abilities TestDistribution of Standard Age Scores

A bar graph of the student’s scores appears on the score report as a visual representation of the student’s percentile score.

Ability Profile System

Ability Profile System

This report shows the results of testing for your child at one particular time on one particular assessment. It is important to always look for multiple pieces of evidence when using assessment data to make decisions.