Outlining Individual Cognitive Caliber with CogAt Profiling

By | October 31, 2014

Nowadays, education is an all-encompassing process of empowering children to discover their hidden potential respecting their individuality and at the same time balancing the social needs in order to evolve as mature and integrated entity. In order to fulfill this objective it is imperative to start early and take avid interest in delving in to the psychological intricacies of budding minds so as to guide them effectively in this complex process of growing up. The institutions are endeavoring to gather as much insight as possible so as to devise relevant educational modules and learning techniques so that all the children in the classroom are able to attain fruition individually as well as collectively. Nowadays, comprehensive research on child psychology is facilitating the growth of cognitive assessment tests like CogAt especially during admission and at times when the child has to decide about his/her preferred subject. Therefore, in this context it is pertinent to understand what are CogAt profiles and how it enables accurate profiling of students based on which an efficacious agenda can be formulated.

A responsive educational curriculum will be adaptable to a wider range of student profiles considering their uniqueness, universality and similarities. This benchmark is essential to simplify instructional delivery and simultaneously reach out to the students with variable strengths and weaknesses. The structure of CogAt test is therefore essentially hinged on eliciting the quintessence of their cognitive intelligence associated with the functioning of their reasoning, critical thinking, verbal skills and numerical orientation and last but not the least spatial abilities. The question battery is arranged objectively focusing on analogies, tricky classifications, series completion which draws their visual and cognitive participation rather than tests which are based on texts and other instructional materials which they have learnt through formal teaching process. The scoring pattern of these exams is therefore atypical from its counterparts and follows a visually narrative, analytical and psychometric model. One of the salient attributes of the result analytics of this test is to analyze and assess what are CogAt profiles apart from the standard concepts pertaining to Universal Scale Score, Standard Age Score, Percentile Rank and Stanines.

It is believed that the education policy makers should be encouraged to decipher what are CogAt profiles for further bridging of the hiatus between the student’s scores and aptitude. CogAT profiling has been designed to capture the differences and discrepancies in the scoring pattern and gauging its corresponding implications which can impact the instruction methodologies as per the demands of the observations. In this type of evaluation merely marking the students right or wrong is not the fundamental objective of the test rather more emphasis is given to the analysis of the nature of errors committed by the students based on which the student profiles are drawn in order to empirically eliminated the gray areas in the aptitude level of the students.