This page is under development.  More coming soon.

 

The Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) is a test of reasoning skills. The CogAT tests a variety of verbal, non-verbal and quantitative skills and uses the overall score achieved as an indication of a child's reasoning ablility. If you drilled your child in questions just like those on the CogAT their performance might improve but it would no longer be reflective of their underlying reasoning ability.

 

This is why your teacher or school district may have told you that there is nothing that you can do to prepare your child for the CogAT.  It is inappropriate and unhelpful to attempt to prepare a child for the CogAT in the same way that children are prepared for the SATs or for state standardized testing. 

 

What you can do completely appropriately is to expose your child to a range of reasoning activities and teach them how to think.  That's what the products recommended here do.

 

For this reason we do not provide a "practice test" nor do we provide information directing parents as to which precise sections of books they should use to prepare their child for testing. Instead we provide a wide range of resources which, if used as designed, will over time improve your child's reasoning ability. This improvement in underlying ability will be reflected in testing.

 

Consider a spelling test as an example. We all know children who can memorize the words on Thursday night, get 100% in the spelling test on Friday and be unable to spell any of those words on Monday.  Drilling your child using questions formatted just like those on the CogAT might improve their test performance but if that leads to acceptance into a gifted program they may find once they're there that they can't keep up with the other children.

 

That said some children are slow to warm up to new things.  They may find the first time that they take a test  like the CogAT that they're not quite sure what they are expected to do.  For this reason the test publisher makes available sample (they call them practice) questions illustrating the format of the questions used on the test.  We have provided a similar selection of questions illustrating the format used in the Primary and Multi-Level Versions of the CogAT.

 

If your child is one who is slow to warm up to new things you may find that purchasing titles like Building Thinking Skills and Math Analogies is worthwhile even though if you have only a short time before your child is tested. Your child can't learn a lot of new skills in a short time but they can become more aware of how they think and problem solve and how to brainstorm when they come across something they haven't seen before.  This can help them during testing.

 

If your child is a fluent reader being tested using the Primary Level of the CogAT it may be well worthwhile using a title like Can You Find Me? to brush up on listening skills prior to testing.