Anonymous wrote:You'll find people on here will blast you for this question.
But we got a book. They will go over the test in class briefly and we considered the book a slightly longer version of the same thing - test familiarization and making sure our kids had test-taking skills.
Same, it's not like we were drilling for hours or over a period of weeks or anything, but we got a workbook with a practice test in it and went through a handful of questions in each section just to make sure they understood the general concept of the question formats. Probably similar to what they do in class, maybe a few more examples, but we didn't do the whole practice test.
We also took this as an opportunity to introduce them to the general concept of test-taking skills, not CogAT-specific. For example we noticed DC was tending to rush through and getting some questions wrong that when we asked them to double-check, they easily found their mistake and corrected it, so we talked about speed vs. accuracy. We talked with them about different ways tests are administered such as fill-in-the-bubble on page vs. fill-in-the-bubble on a separate scantron vs. computer-based, and the pros-and-cons of each. The paper ones you generally can go back and double-check your work if you have extra time, the computer ones you sometimes can but often can't so plan accordingly to double-check your work before proceeding in those cases. Sometimes a wrong answer is penalized more than a blank, sometimes it isn't so it's best to take your best guess (and discussed eliminating as many options as possible when not sure the answer). Stuff like that.