Third, fifth and seventh-year students take the CogAT, one of two standardized tests that MSSA administers each year. The CogAT is a series of tests that assesses students’ reasoning and problem-solving abilities with different types of verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal questions. The abilities appraised are those that enable students to:
- acquire, organize, store in memory, and recall information
- make inferences
- detect relationships
- comprehend and analyze problem situations
- form concepts
- discover and remember sequences
- recognize patterns
- classify or categorize objects, events, and concepts
- infer rules and principles
- relate and use previous experience
- accomplish new learning tasks or solve novel problems
The skills measured by CogAT develop gradually throughout a person’s lifetime, but individuals vary in the rates at which they develop the skills, as experiences in and out of school influence their development. The CogAT will be administered for students in October during the school day. Third and fifth-year students take the CogAT during their Specials rotations the week of October 18. Seventh-grade students take the CogAT throughout the day Wednesday, October 20, in lieu of classes in the morning that day.
The best preparation parents can give children for these upcoming testing sessions is to make sure they get a good night’s sleep and are fed and hydrated – we don’t recommend any outside testing preparation. Results will be available during the Spring semester.