(15.1) Turn to p. 559 in Ormrod’s text. Now, imagine that you are meeting with
Ingrid’s grandmother today to explain her scores on the recent standardized
achievement test pictured at the bottom of p. 559. What will you tell her about Ingrid’s
performance? her strengths? her weaknesses?
Prior
to the meeting with Ingrid’s grandmother, I will make sure to look into how
Ingrid’s doing in all these subjects and try to see if her standardized achievement
scores accurately reflect her strengths and weaknesses. Especially, I will try to
talk to her spelling and math teachers and see if she’s actually struggling in
these subjects.
During
the meeting, I will start by telling Ingrid’s grandmother that the standardized
achievement tests Ingrid took is norm-referenced, or that they compare Ingrid’s
raw scores with that of the students at her grade level. The ultimate purpose
of the standardized achievement tests is to help all students improve
academically by assessing how much they’ve learned in selected subject areas.
We, as teachers, hope to use this information to help improve our instructional
strategies accordingly. However, standardized achievement tests provide only a
rough idea of what students know and can do.
I
will then go over the computer printout with Ingrid’s grandmother by first explaining
the concepts of percentile (that percentile reflects the percentage of students
at Ingrid’s grade that scored less than or equal to Ingrid), stanine (have a
mean of 5 and a standard deviation of 2), and confidence intervals (the amount
of error due to imperfect reliability of the test, or how Ingrid’s performances
in the same subject area ranges) on the score report.
I
will then tell Ingrid’s grandmother that Ingrid’s strengths are her
well-above-average achievement in reading, comprehension, science, and social
studies. Ingrid also scored average to above-average in math concepts. As
suggested by the standardized achievement tests, Ingrid had more than average
difficulty in spelling and math computations. Thus, according to the
standardized achievement tests, spelling and math computations are areas that
we might need to work more on in the next couple of years. Finally, this is the
time I will also talk about how Ingrid’s actually doing in her classes and
whether the scores actually reflect her performances in school.
I like how you checked on Ingrid's class scores and achievement as well. After all, the textbook said that we should use more than one test score to make educational decisions.
ReplyDeleteSuch a great idea to check on Ingrid's progress in her classes before generalizing her strengths and weaknesses to her efforts on the test! There seems to be such great emphasis on test scores that educators sometimes ignore the actual progress that their students have achieved in class! Sometimes we have to look at other factors during a test that may have prohibited the student from achieving what he or she is capable of, and we must take that into consideration.
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