Growth in general cognitive skills is a developmental process that begins at birth and continues throughout most of one’s life. It is strongly related to age and, after age six or seven, to the level of education. Since cognitive growth is a developmental process, performance on any cognitive task can be interpreted and given meaning by comparing an individual’s performance on the task with that of a representative sample of peers of the same age or the same grade in school. These types of normative comparison are used when interpreting scores on CogAT.

Two types of norms are provided for all levels of CogAT—age norms and grade norms. In school systems where the characteristics of the student population differ markedly from those of a national sample of school-aged children, local norms can be used to better distinguish the relative standings of their students.