Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT)
What is CogAT?
The Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT) assesses learned reasoning abilities of students. The CogAT focuses on three areas of reasoning that research shows are closely related to success in school (1) The Verbal Battery measures students’ ability to reason with words and solve verbal problems. (2) The Quantitative Battery assesses their ability to organize and reason with quantitative concepts. (3) The Nonverbal Battery tests students’ ability to reason with figural drawings and invent strategies to solve novel problems. Since cognitive growth is a developmental process, performance on the CogAT can be given meaning by comparing an individual’s scores to those of a representative sample of peers who are the same age or who are in the same grade in school. Even though it measures reasoning abilities that are a critical component of all definitions of intelligence, the CogAT is not an intelligence test.