Achievement & Ability Measures
The North American Division Office of Education and the anywhere Union examined all of the available standardized tests from commercial publishers and chose the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS), the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED), and the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAt) from Riverside Publishing as the best match for assessing Adventists curriculum. By using these products together educators will create a comprehensive picture of each students, by measuring both their academic achievement and ability.
Measure of Student Ability
The CogAT is a measure of a student’s potential to succeed in school-related tasks. It is not a tool for measuring a student’s intelligence or IQ. It measures the reasoning skills a student has developed during his or her educational career, even though these skills may not have been explicitly taught.
Features:
- Concurrently normed with the ITBS and the ITED
- Provides predictive achievement scores when given with The Iowa Tests
- Offers detailed individual reports that describe the level and pattern of each student’s cognitive abilities
- Includes balanced gender and ethnic representation
- Measures verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal reasoning skills
Visit the following link for more information about the CogAt.
Measure of Student Achievement
The ITBS(elementary and middle school) and the ITED (high school) are a set of co-normed achievement tests that measure the actual knowledge and skills students have acquired. Based on over 70 years of research, The Iowa Tests provide an in-depth assessment of students’ achievement in important educational objectives.
Features:
- Comparisons made to the national norm group
- Comparisons made to local or specific norm groups
- Flexible accommodations for students with special needs
Visit the following links for more information about the ITBS or ITED.
The CogAT is not an IQ test
The CogAT is a measure of a student’s potential to succeed in school-related tasks. It is NOT a tool for measuring a student’s intelligence or IQ. Rather, it measures the reasoning skills that have developed during a student’s educational career, even though they have not been explicitly taught. These general cognitive skills are not specific to any content area, but are skills that are used in all areas of a student’s academic experiences. The CogAT also measures general “school skills,” such as the ability to listen, follow directions, and focus attention.
The CogAT scores are measured as:
- verbal (verbal classification, sentence completion, and verbal analogies);
- quantitative (quantitative relations, number series, and equation building); and,
- nonverbal (figure classification, figure analogies, and figure analysis).
The standardization of the CogAT was designed to provide national norms based on a sample of the entire U.S. school population. This “norm group” includes representative samples from 6,000 to 9,000 students drawn from public and private schools; from all geographic regions; from rural, suburban, and urban schools; and from schools of all sizes.
Benefits of using the CogAT
- Your conference and school feels it is important to administer the CogAT to have one view of a child’s ability to be successful in school and to look for dominant learning strengths.
- CogAT results are most commonly used when a teacher has concerns about a student’s classroom performance or lack of progress. A teacher will look at the CogAT score to get a general sense of a student’s abilities and learning styles, which may lead to further analysis.
- Teachers may select from different CogAT levels. However, it must be done with permission from their superintendent. Please note the information below and consult with the Interpretive Guide for School Administrators before making any changes in a student taking the "Average" level. More information can be obtained from Riverside Publishing's CogAT page.
Items to Remember
- Standardized testing is only one way to measure student ability and achievement—it’s not the only way. Human capabilities are much more diverse and complex than what is measured by standardized achievement tests or school ability tests. As we learn more from the fields of cognitive science and brain research, definitions of human learning are changing.
- Educators consider scores from these tests as one view of a student. Classroom performance and teacher assessments are equally important
- Teachers also recognize that students’ test-taking skills and attitudes during testing sessions affect their results.
Caution: The results of the Iowa Tests must not be used as the sole criteria for judging student performance. It is important to use this information in conjunction with other assessments such as locally administered assessments and classroom performance.
Please note: CognitiveGenesis is different from CogAT. CognitiveGenesis is the name of the research project and CogAT is the name of one of the cognitive abilities tests. CognitiveGenesis does not distribute, collect, or report results for the tests (ITBS/ITED or CogAT). Students take the test at their school and the school is responsible for returning the tests to Riverside Publishing. CognitiveGenesis obtains the test results from Riverside Publishing and correlates them with the data it collected through the surveys.