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February's Tip for Parents
From ISVI's Social Services & Counseling Department
Tips for Parents on
Understanding Test Scores
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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