Tips For Parents-February, 2008

Parents with “special children” are familiar with the Individual Education Plan (IEP) process and its dependence on Test Scores to determine eligibility for special education, the intensity of that programming (% of the day in special classes), and the essential components of that programming (goals and objectives). Usually, special education eligibility and programming is based primarily upon medical, psychological, and academic test scores. Medical test scores are essential for the IEP process to determine special education eligibility for some areas such as Visual or Hearing Impairment. However, most tests used in schools for determining special education eligibility, the intensity of that programming and the particular components of that programming are either “norm-referenced” or “criterion-referenced” tests.

Norm-referenced tests compare an individual child’s performance to that of his or her classmates or some other, larger group. Such scores indicate how your child compares to similar children on a given set of skills and knowledge. However, these scores do not indicate what your child does and does not know. They only indicate how your child compares relative to a particular group. Norm-referenced scores usually take the form of Percentiles, Stanines, Standard Scores, or Age/Grade Equivalent Scores.

Percentile Scores indicate the rank of your child’s score as compared to a hypothetical group of 100 of their peers. For example, a percentile rank of 45 would indicate that your child obtained a score that is better than 45 percent of their peers. It should be noted that a percentile is different from a percent score. A percent indicates the percentage of correct responses on a test, where as a percentile indicates how they performed when compared to their peers.

Stanine Scores are groupings of percentile scores with the entire group divided into 9 parts with the largest number of individuals falling in the middle Stanine scores (3-7) and fewer scores at the extremes. Stanine scores are not commonly used in education today.

Standard Scores are derived from your child’s raw score comparing it to the norming raw scores gathered when the test was developed. Thus, a standard score compares your child’s score to those in the normative sample to determine how far above or below the average they performed. Usually, standard scores have an average of “100" and an average range of “80-120". Most intelligence and many achievement tests use some type of standard score format.

Age/Grade Equivalent Scores indicate that your child has attained the same score (not always the same skill) as the average student of that age or grade. For example, if your child obtained a grade equivalent score of 4.2 on a reading comprehension test, this means that they obtained the same score as the typical student in the 2nd month of the fourth grade.

Criterion-Referenced Tests are used to measure student mastery of instructional objectives rather than to compare one student with another or to rank students. They are often used as end of unit tests in textbooks or as a benchmark to identify areas of strength and weakness. They are usually reported as a percent correct.