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Grades
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Frequency
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State or District Initiated
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CogAT
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Grades 3 and 6
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1 time per year
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District
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The CogAT is given in grades 3 and 6. It measures students’ learned reasoning abilities in the three areas most linked to academic success in school: Verbal, Quantitative and Nonverbal. Its primary goal is to assess students’ reasoning abilities. CogAT can help educators make important student placement decisions.
The term CogAT implies to Cognitive Abilities Test that is used for assessing the reasoning and problem-solving skills of students. The results of CogAT are generally used to predict the success of students in school, although reasoning abilities tend to develop gradually throughout a person’s lifetime, it develops at different rates. CogAT results of students of the same age indicate the level of understanding, reasoning and problem-solving abilities in three different areas – verbal, quantitative and non-verbal. However, CogAT does not gauge other factors like motivation, effort and work habits that are also vital for school achievement.
All three sections in CogAT are referred to as batteries and each battery consists of a set of questions that test different reasoning and problem solving abilities of a student. In the CogAT verbal battery, a student is tested for his/her flexibility, adaptability and reasoning with spoken materials and in solving verbal questions. These reasoning skills play a major role in nearly all verbal learning tasks, reading knowledge, critical thinking and writing.
In the CogAT quantitative battery, the quantitative reasoning skills, flexibility and ease while working with quantitative figures and concepts and the ability to establish, structure and define a meaning to an unordered set of numerals and arithmetic symbols are checked. This type of reasoning abilities is related to problem-solving skills in mathematics and other disciplines.
The non-verbal battery in CogAT evaluates the reasoning abilities of the student using some geometric figures and shapes. This section contains a set of novel problems and the student has to devise strategies to successfully and effectively solve the problem. For solving these types of unusual problems, a student has to not only be flexible while inventing ideas but also be accurate to implement on them.
CogAT is a nationally normed test and is very useful in comparing a student’s test performance with the test performances of other students of the same age. This helps both teachers and parents to know about the child’s school accomplishment.
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