North Mason looks at changes to program

Changes coming to the North Mason School District’s Highly Capable Program should see more students qualify for the program, Savannah Elliott, district assessment coordinator highly capable services coordinator, told the North Mason School Board on June 24.

Starting in the fall, a new ability test for students in kindergarten through 12th grade will use nonverbal methods that are good for use with a diverse student population, Elliott said.

She told the board how the hiCap program has evolved.

In previous years, a single data point could disqualify a student from the program. This school year, the district was required to use multiple data points for disqualification.

“However, one data point could qualify a student if it is amazing, which has happened,” Elliott said.

North Mason universally screens second and fifth grades and nominations to the program were “very limited,” she said.

Now, referrals are open to all grade levels and are publicly advertised.

Elliott said she received almost 50 nominations this year and many of the students qualified for the hiCap.

Other criteria include the CogAT test, which measures cognitive ability with multiple-choice verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal questions, FastBridge scores, which measure reading, math and social-emotional behavior, other state assessment scores, and for multilingual students, Elliott looks at growth.

“If a student is learning a language, sometimes a third language, very, very quickly, it’s probably a sign that they are cognitively gifted,” Elliott said.

In the 2024/2025 school year, North Mason will replace CogAT with the NNAT3, Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, which uses shapes and figures to evaluate the problem-solving and reasoning abilities of students without using language skills.

Elliott said one benefit of the NNAT3 test was it only took 30 minutes. The CogAt can take two hours, she said.

“If I can get less testing and more instruction time, all the better,” she said.

For the CogAT assessment, students had to read an analogy and “not only do they have to have a pretty good reading level, they have to have the background knowledge to know what those words mean, which isn’t really fair to all of our students” according to Elliott.

She said the district wanted to change the hiCap assessment test to entirely nonverbal.

The NNAT3 test is endorsed by the National Association of Talented and Gifted Children as “a great way to identify those students who are linguistically diverse, culturally diverse and come from low-income backgrounds,” Elliott said.

Elliott said she really wanted to switch to a test for gifted students that was “more fair.”