Many schools in the US and Canada use the Cognitive Abilities Test, or CogAT, to find students for gifted and talented programs. If your child has a test coming up, the most useful thing you can do first is understand what the test actually asks. It is not a test of what your child learned in class. It measures how a child reasons with words, numbers and shapes they have never seen before.

The CogAT has three parts, called batteries. Each battery has three kinds of questions:

• Verbal: analogies, sentence completion and classification. In kindergarten to grade 2 these use pictures, and the teacher reads the questions aloud.
• Quantitative: number analogies, number puzzles and number series. Young children see counters, beads and trains instead of written numbers.
• Nonverbal: figure matrices, paper folding and figure classification. These use only shapes, so reading level does not matter.

Schools may give all three batteries or only one, often the nonverbal part as a quick screener.

The test comes in levels that match age. Kindergarten uses Level 5/6, grade 1 uses Level 7 and grade 2 uses Level 8. In these levels everything is picture based and read aloud, with roughly 120 to 160 questions in total spread over several sessions.

From grade 3 (Level 9) the format becomes more like a regular paper or computer test. Verbal questions use written words, and each of the nine sections is timed at about 10 minutes, about 90 minutes of testing in total. Children who did well on picture questions sometimes struggle here simply because the format is new.

Results usually come as a Standard Age Score, where 100 is average for the child’s age, and as a percentile rank. A child at the 90th percentile scored higher than 90 out of 100 children of the same age. Gifted programs often look for scores in the top few percent, but each district sets its own rules, so ask your school which score and which battery they use.

Memorizing answers does not help, because every question on the real test is new. What helps is getting comfortable with the question formats and learning a way to think through each type:

• Say the rule out loud. For any analogy, ask your child to finish the sentence “the first one goes with the second one because…” before looking at the choices.
• Check one thing at a time. In shape questions, look at shape, color, size, number and direction separately.
• Practice a little every day. Ten to fifteen minutes daily works better than a long session on the weekend.
• Keep it positive. A wrong answer is a chance to find the rule together, not a failure.

Prep4Gifted practice questions are original and written by our team. Prep4Gifted is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Riverside Insights (CogAT) or Pearson (NNAT, OLSAT). Test names are trademarks of their owners.