Introducing a child to a formal education system can be a very perplexing procedure for both the child and his educators. Therefore, CogAt tests were designed to assess the psychological and cognitive capabilities of the student so that a friendly and adaptive curriculum can be designed for their knowledge assimilation process. The purpose of this test is not to understand how much they know but to derive sufficient insight about their natural disposition and propensities which contributes towards acquiring knowledge. Beginning from preschool till attaining their final stage in twelve grades in school every academic phase in a child’s life can be tracked and assessed with the aid of cognitive tests which aims to fathom the divergent facets of their emotional and intellectual responses. Generally a cognitive test structure is broadly divided in three parts comprising quantitative questionnaire battery, verbal and non-verbal drills which are pictorial, figurative, analogy and reasoning based content. Although apparently simple the CogAt tests are extremely tricky and intricate and therefore extensive mock practice and orientation is required for figuring out how to prepare for the second grade CogAt tests.
Over and above the structure of the test the scoring pattern of the exam also gives unique observations about your child’s strengths, weaknesses and overall performance. The tests provide you with fair amount of idea about your child’s area of struggle or whether he/she is having issues with any facets of their cognitive faculties and what kind of an instructional design will be tailor made for their needs and requirements. The practice drills are instrumental in exhibiting the tricks and strategies of how to prepare for the second grade CogAt tests. These practice sessions are simulated CogAt exams which give your child the feel of the real test and perform to the best of their ability be it abstract reasoning, establishing complex analogical relationships, classification, figurative visualization, recognition, memory, attention and time management among others. Therefore, without sufficient exposure these tests can be extremely bewildering for the young minds. The practice also makes the observations more reliable and therefore acts as a survey for interpreting the continuously evolving cognitive graph of the growing children.
Like the actual tests the simulated practice drills also vividly replicates the unique scoring pattern for giving the students conception about how to prepare for the second grade CogAt tests. The students ought to know as to how are they being evaluated in this test for better understanding of the exam nuances. The candidate must be aware that he will be judged comparatively with respect to his peers through various calibrating scales like stanines, percentile rank, composite score and narrative profiling of candidates based on the nature of the errors they commit which are extensively documented in the CogAt report card.