One test shapes the next six years.

The Cognitive Abilities Test, published by Riverside Insights, is a group-administered reasoning test many districts use to screen for gifted programs. It has three batteries, verbal, quantitative and nonverbal, and reports a score for each plus a composite. Gifted Star practises the question formats those batteries use; it is not the test itself and contains no real test items.

The Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, published by Pearson, measures reasoning entirely through shapes and patterns, with no reading or language at all. Districts often choose it when a cohort includes English learners. Its question types are pattern completion, reasoning by analogy, serial reasoning and spatial visualisation, and the NNAT track practises all four.

GATE, gifted and talented education, is run district by district in California rather than statewide, so the screening instrument, the grade it happens in and the qualifying cut-off all vary. Many districts use a reasoning test such as the CogAT, NNAT or OLSAT, sometimes alongside teacher recommendation and classroom work. Your district's GATE page is the reliable source for which one it uses. Gifted Star's California GATE track combines the most common verbal, quantitative and nonverbal question formats from across those screeners, so practice is not limited to one publisher's test.

Most districts screen in the second half of the school year, commonly in grade 2 or 3, though some begin in kindergarten and others test annually on referral. Dates and referral deadlines are set locally, so your district office or your child's teacher is the source to trust. Whenever it falls, the preparation that helps is familiarity with the question formats rather than cramming.

Gifted Star provides CogAT-style and NNAT-style practice, a California GATE track that combines common question types from the reasoning screeners districts use for GATE referral, and a mixed track when you don't know which test is coming. The formats are modelled on the published category descriptions for those test families.

CogAT® is a registered trademark of Riverside Insights and NNAT® is a registered trademark of Pearson Education, Inc. This app is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by either company, and contains no real test items. GATE refers to California school districts' gifted and talented education programs; this app is not affiliated with any district or with the California Department of Education.

It doesn't measure IQ, produce a percentile, estimate a score, assess or diagnose anything, or predict whether a child gets into a gifted program. No practice app can do those honestly.

What it does is make the format familiar, so the questions on test day aren't the first ones your child has seen.

Kindergarten, Grade 1, Grade 2, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, and more.

It works completely offline: questions are generated on the device, not downloaded. Profiles and practice history are stored locally, and we don't receive them. There's no account and no ads. Limited technical, usage and purchase data is processed for analytics and advertising measurement, which the privacy policy sets out in full.

Up to six on one device, each with their own grade, track, difficulty levels, saved list and trophies, and each is shown separately to the parent.

Free to download and try. Unlimited is a paid upgrade. Current pricing displayed on the App Store. See the Terms of Use. It runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS or iPadOS 17 or later, and on Apple silicon Macs. There's no Android or web version.

Questions? Email support@curioak.com.