IIF Certified Assessment
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IIF Certified Assessment
An age-appropriate assessment for children aged 4 to 17, across four cognitive areas. It is built to feel like an activity rather than an exam — no countdown on screen, no red timer, no pass or fail. This page sets out exactly what your child will see, what the result means, and, just as importantly, what it does not mean.
Some parents will be tempted to read a number here as a verdict on their child. It is not one, and we would rather say so before you start than in the small print afterwards.
This is a self-administered screening tool designed as an educational activity. It does not replace a cognitive evaluation carried out by a licensed psychologist, and its result should not be used for gifted-programme applications, school admissions, special-education determinations, or any clinical purpose.
If something is genuinely worrying you, speak to your paediatrician or a licensed child psychologist. They can assess properly, under controlled conditions. This page cannot, and does not try to.
This is not one test, it is three. Pick a band and the panel underneath fills in straight away — how long it takes, how much reading there is, and how much of it you will be part of. The sample item, the report and the start button further down follow the same choice.
Sit beside your child and read each instruction out loud. Tapping the pictures is the whole interaction — there is nothing to type and nothing to spell. If they lose interest, close the tab; nothing is recorded as a failure and you can start again another day.
Most children in this band prefer to work on their own. Get them started, read the first question together, then leave them to it and stay within earshot. Being asked what a word means is normal and answering does not spoil anything.
This band is close to the adult assessment in length and difficulty. Hand it over and step back. The most useful thing you can do is make sure they are not doing it at midnight on a phone with notifications on — tiredness costs more marks than difficulty does.
Everything below is now set for ages 4–7ages 8–12ages 13–17.
Children rush when they can see a clock. So we do not show them one — the session has an expected length for planning your afternoon, but nothing counts down on screen and nothing turns red.
Done above. The test loads a different set of items for 4–7, 8–12 and 13–17. A five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old never see the same screen.
No account and nothing to install. Younger children do far better with an adult reading the instructions aloud, and there is no countdown anywhere on screen to rush them.
The score arrives straight away, written in plain language for a parent — including a clear note on what it does not tell you.
Nothing here is scored and nothing is recorded — it is here so you can judge the level yourself before your child sees it. Change the age group above and this item changes with it.
Which shape comes next?
Tap an answer
Read this one out loud to your child — there is nothing here they need to read themselves. Items in this band are pictures end to end. Your child taps a shape; nothing is typed, spelled or read aloud by them.
A bird lives in a nest. Where does a bee live?
Tap an answer
Two short sentences and four one-word answers — that is the reading load for this band. This band mixes word items like this one with picture items. The vocabulary is chosen for the age group, and the question is about the relationship rather than the spelling.
Two things change from one figure to the next. Which figure comes fourth?
Tap an answer
No wording help here — working out what to look for is part of the item. By this band items carry more than one rule at a time, which is what brings the format close to the adult assessment.
Thirteen years separate the youngest child this is built for from the oldest. The bands exist because almost nothing about the experience should be the same at both ends — not the length, not the reading, and not how much of it you are part of.
Ages 4–7At four or five the session is a shared activity. You read the instruction, they point at the picture they want, and the whole thing is over in about the length of a bedtime story.
Nothing has to be typed, spelled or written down, so a child who cannot yet read is not at any disadvantage.
Ages 13–17By the mid-teens it is closer to the adult assessment: longer, wordier, and with items that run two rules at once. Most would rather you were not watching, and that is fine.
The useful thing you can do at this end is unglamorous — make sure it is not being done at midnight on a phone.
The same four cognitive areas the adult assessment covers — but the items are written for the age band, and the score is normed against children of that age rather than against adults. Each area has a grown-up version too, if you want to try one yourself.
Understanding what words mean and how they connect to each other. Vocabulary is chosen for the age band. This is not spelling, grammar or handwriting.
Adult verbal test Numerical reasoningSpotting a pattern in a run of quantities. Deliberately not the maths homework — no long division, no times tables, no word problems about trains.
Adult numerical test Spatial reasoningTurning, folding and matching shapes in the mind’s eye. There is nothing at all to read here, which is why it travels well across languages.
Adult spatial test Abstract reasoningFinding the rule a set of pictures is following, then applying it. Works the same whatever language is spoken at home — useful in multilingual families.
Culture-fair testWe would rather be straight with you than sell you something: sitting a cognitive screening does not, by itself, make a child cleverer. What it can do is show you which kind of thinking your child reaches for first — and that is genuinely useful, because almost everything that supports a developing mind is ordinary, costs nothing, and is already sitting in your house.
Children get better at the thinking they actually do. If shapes come easily and words come slower, that is not a fault to correct — it is a signal about which games will land on their own, and which ones need to be made a little more inviting before they will.
Most parents can already feel where their child leans. Having a name for it — verbal, numerical, spatial, abstract — makes the conversation with a teacher shorter and a great deal more specific than “she is bright, but…”
Nearly every child is stronger in some areas than others, and at these ages the gaps are wide and they keep moving. Seeing that written down, in plain language, is often the most reassuring part of the whole exercise.
So what actually helps? Not flashcards, and not a second sitting of this test. The things with the strongest support behind them for children’s thinking are unglamorous, and they map neatly onto the four areas the screening looks at.
Keep reading together long past the age it stops feeling necessary, and talk about why a character did something rather than what happened next. Verbal reasoning grows on back-and-forth conversation far more than on worksheets. See the grown-up verbal reasoning test for the adult version of the same idea.
Blocks, jigsaws, origami, drawing from odd angles, building something from a picture with no words on it. Spatial skill is the one that responds most reliably to practice at every age, which makes it the best value of the four. The adult spatial reasoning test uses the same families of task.
Cooking, scores, change in a shop, splitting things fairly between siblings. Quantity handled out loud in real situations does more than drilling tables, because the reasoning is the point rather than the arithmetic. Compare with the adult numerical reasoning test.
Rule-based games, sequences, spot-the-odd-one-out, simple logic puzzles, and the kind of card game where the rule changes halfway through. This is the area that travels best across languages, which is why the culture-fair test leans on it entirely.
No activity on this list moves a child’s thinking as reliably as being properly rested. If you only change one thing after reading this page, a consistent bedtime will do more for the result — and for the week around it — than any puzzle book.
A child who believes thinking is something you either are or are not good at will avoid the hard question rather than sit with it. Praise the trying, not the score. This is the part of the whole exercise that is entirely in your hands.
No percentile tables to decode and no jargon. Here is the shape of it — made-up numbers, real layout. For the wider picture of how scores are built, see how IQ tests work.
In plain words: higher than roughly 79 children out of every 100 the same age. A different day, a better night’s sleep or a noisier room would all move this number, which is why one session is a snapshot rather than a measurement.
It is the single most searched question parents ask about cognitive testing, so it deserves a straight answer rather than a hedge. The short version: this screening cannot tell you, and neither can any online test. The longer version — what the word actually means, and what genuinely points towards it — is worth two minutes before you go looking anywhere else.
The most commonly described marker is unevenness: reasoning that runs years ahead of handwriting, emotional regulation, or patience. A child who reads early but melts down over a shoelace is the classic picture, and it is the one parents most often mistake for a problem.
Not simply curious about everything, but unreasonably deep on one thing — volcanoes, timetables, a particular animal — and able to hold far more detail about it than the topic seems to warrant.
Grasping a rule from very few examples, transferring it somewhere new unprompted, or asking the “but what if” question that the explanation had not covered yet.
Recalling detail from months back that adults in the room have lost, particularly detail tied to something they cared about at the time.
Strong reactions to fairness, to noise, to texture, to a story ending badly. Heightened sensitivity is widely reported alongside high ability, and it is frequently the harder half for the family to live with.
Switching off, clowning, or refusing work that is pitched below them. Plenty of things cause this and most of them are not giftedness — which is exactly why it needs assessing properly rather than guessing.
Every one of those also appears in children who are not gifted, which is the honest problem with a checklist. Formally, most education systems and professional bodies use roughly the top 2% on a full, professionally administered assessment — commonly a score at or above 130 — and identification is never made on a single number alone. A supervised assessment by a licensed psychologist looks at several sources of evidence, under controlled conditions, on a day chosen for the child rather than for the diary. Our page on how IQ tests work explains where that threshold comes from, and how accurate IQ tests are covers why one sitting is never enough.
What this screening can honestly offer is a first look: whether your child’s profile is unusually uneven, and which area is carrying it. That is a reasonable thing to take to a teacher, and a reasonable reason to ask for a proper assessment. It is not, and will never be, the assessment itself.
This is the part most kids’ IQ pages leave out. Cognitive scores measured in childhood are markedly less stable than adult ones, and the younger the child, the truer that is. Our page on how accurate IQ tests are goes into why.
A result at six can look very different at twelve. Children’s abilities develop unevenly and in bursts, so a change between two sittings is ordinary development rather than a warning sign.
Sleep, mood, hunger and how familiar the format feels affect children far more than adults. A low session is more often a tired session than anything else.
The most useful thing you can do with the number is talk about it once, notice what your child enjoyed, and then put it down.
The most productive way to use a result like this is sideways. Ask which questions your child liked rather than which ones they got right — the shapes, the words, or the ones with a rule hidden in them. That answer is usually more useful than the number, and it is the part children actually remember.
If the score is lower than you expected, the first thing to check is not your child’s ability but the conditions: time of day, screen size, how many people were talking in the room. If it is higher than you expected, the same caution applies in the other direction. Read more on whether IQ can be improved.
Compare all the test formats →Still unsure about something? The general FAQ covers scoring, certificates and retakes, and about us explains who builds these.
Ages 4 through 17, split into three bands — 4–7, 8–12 and 13–17. Each band uses different items, a different length and a different amount of reading. Below age 4, a self-administered screening of this kind is not reliable enough to be worth doing.
For 4–7, sit with them and read the instructions aloud; the items are pictures, so your job is the words around them, not the answers. For 8–12, being nearby is enough. Most 13–17s would rather you were in another room, and that is fine.
No. This is a screening activity, not a diagnostic instrument. Schools and programmes that require cognitive testing will name the assessments they accept, and those are administered in person by licensed professionals. Submitting an online result in their place will not help your child.
A single online session is not a reason to worry. Tiredness, an unfamiliar format, a distracting room or simply a bad afternoon all move the number, and they move it more for children than for adults. If you have a genuine, ongoing concern about your child’s development, that belongs with your paediatrician or a child psychologist, who can assess properly.
No account is needed to start, and we ask for as little as we can. Exactly what is collected and how it is handled is set out in our Security and Privacy Policy. If you have a specific question before you begin, ask us — we would rather answer it than have you guess.
There is no single good score, and the number means less at these ages than parents expect. Scores are set so that the middle of any age group sits around 100, with most children falling between 85 and 115 — so an average result is genuinely the common result, not a disappointing one. What matters more here is the shape across the four areas, not the headline figure. How IQ tests work explains where the scale comes from, and average IQ by country shows how the same numbers get reported elsewhere.
Two things change. The items are rewritten for the age band — shorter, more pictorial, and with vocabulary a child of that age would actually meet — and the scoring compares your child only with other children of the same age, never with adults. A ten-year-old is not expected to answer what a thirty-year-old answers; they are measured against ten-year-olds. If you want the adult version for yourself, that is the Classical IQ Test.
The commonly described signs are uneven development, unusually deep interest in one narrow topic, early abstract reasoning, a strong memory for detail, heightened sensitivity, and boredom that looks like misbehaviour. Every one of those also occurs in children who are not gifted, which is why a checklist cannot settle it. Formal identification generally means roughly the top 2% on a full assessment administered by a licensed psychologist, never an online screening. We set this out at more length in “Is my child gifted?” further up this page.
Yes, and it should be expected to. Childhood scores are the least stable scores there are — a result at six can look markedly different at twelve, because children develop unevenly and in bursts. That is ordinary development rather than a warning sign. Treat any result here as a snapshot of one afternoon. Our page on whether IQ can be improved covers what genuinely shifts and what does not.
Not separately within the kids test — it always runs all four areas, because a single area on its own tells you very little about a child. You will still get a per-area breakdown in the report, so you can see whether words or shapes are carrying the result. If you want to try a single-domain assessment yourself, the adult verbal reasoning test and spatial reasoning test each focus on one area at a time.
It depends on the age band — the youngest band is closest to the length of a bedtime story, and the teen band runs longer and wordier. There is no countdown on screen and nothing is timed against your child. You can close it at any point and nothing is recorded as a failure, which is deliberate: a child who feels they have run out of time stops reasoning and starts guessing.
For the words section, possibly, and it is worth naming rather than glossing over: a verbal item measures reasoning as expressed in one particular language, so a child working in their second language can be underestimated by it. The shapes and patterns sections carry no reading at all and are unaffected. If you would rather remove language from the picture entirely, the culture-fair test is built for exactly that.
Doing it alongside your child takes the strangeness out of it. All eight formats sit together on the IQ Tests page.
No account needed, and you can stop at any point. The age group you picked further up is the one that will load — and if you picked the wrong one, just start again.
Start the Ages 4–7 test →Start the Ages 8–12 test →Start the Ages 13–17 test →
