GT Preparation Strategies for Parents

1. Keep communication open with the second grade teacher of your child. Work positively with him/her on every little progress, academically or behaviorally. Although the screening committee of your local school consists of several members, the voice of your second grade teacher weighs most.
2. Know who the GT Specialist is in your school. Get his/her suggestions as early as possible in the process. Don’t wait until the decision has already been made. The appealing process is not fun, FOR PARENTS! Trust me!
3. Work samples: Math sheets of multi digit multiplication or division won’t help a lot. Find some samples that can truly reflect the creative capability of your child, such as robot and lego models, stories and poems, pictures of scientific projects or him/her doing them. Start paying attention to and collecting them even when your child is in kindergarten. So, Moms, you’ve found a new work-from-home opportunity! This could be your full-time job!
4. If you do need to appeal, my personal recommendation is to go to testing institution that your county recommends and find out what tests are acceptable by the county. For example, Fairfax County Public Schools recommends the George Mason University Psychological Clinic. Schedule with them early because they will get very busy after everybody receives the decision. The appealing window doesn’t open long.
5. Although it is not recommended to prepare kids for the tests, I personally feel it is necessary to equip yourself and your child with the knowledge of what types of questions are tested and how they are administered. I got my son these two books: Practice Test for the Cognitive Abilities Test CogAT® Multilevel Editionand Practice Test for the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test® (NNAT®) Level C.

How did my son get in GT?

Boy, it was a bumpy road and a real learning experience for us because with my daughter’s easy enrollment, we didn’t realize how much effort parents needed to put in this. Please bear with me for this long story.

My son got 129 for CogAt and 143 for NNAT. But he was rejected because his GBRS rating was only 2. Being an active boy, he talked a lot in second grade, which led to some incomplete class work. We didn’t do a good job in communicating timely with his second grade teacher on improving his behaviors.

We had to act quickly because the appealing window was only one month. Right after receiving the rejection letter, we scheduled a meeting with his GT Specialist who was new to the school. She told us the work samples we submitted were not good but she didn’t communicate with us before the submission. We also found out that his second grade teacher was the only one that presented at the local GBRS committee meeting. My son did very well in first grade, but his first grade teachers didn’t attend the meeting.

We decided to appeal. Without much help from the local GT Specialist who scheduled a second meeting with us but cancelled it later on, we did a lot of research (I’ll talk about many useful sites we visited later) and decided to take the WISC-IV test with George Mason University.

On the testing day, he went in and out with a smiling face (he is always a happy kid), and finished half an hour earlier than the other kids. Waiting for his score was like a torture for us. In the meanwhile we prepared additional samples, taking pictures of some of his science projects and lego models. His WISC score turned out to be 130. We submitted the appealing package and started another long waiting process. Finally a letter at the end of June brought the good news that he got in! Whew, what a relief!

How did my daughter get in GT?

My daughter is a fifth grader now in the GT (now called AAP) program. She loves reading and writing. She is a bit slow in math but working hard. Her CogAt and NNAT scores were 141 and 129 when she took the tests at the second grade, which is an accurate reflection of her strengths and weaknesses. She loves nature and science. The GT Specialist at her school happened to be her science teacher. She liked the thoughtful questions my daughter always asked in her class, and rated her 14 out of 16 on the Gifted Behaviors Rating Scale (GBRS). My daughter got into GT smoothly without us knowing the process and working hard on collecting her samples.
As parents who didn’t grow up in the American educational system, we didn’t even know about the GT program when she was about to take the tests. Luckily her second grade teacher and GT Specialist were very helpful in providing information and finding her work samples in her school portfolio folder.