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Dear Parents, I wanted to pass along the following information to help you understand your child’s test results and prepare any questions you may have for parent teacher conferences. Please call me if I can assist you in anyway. In addition to this information you can find an explanation of the individual tests included in the Iowa Test of Basic Skills on my Web page under "Description of Standardized Tests." The ITBS measures achievement in three major areas: language arts, which includes listening skills in the primary grades, spelling, punctuation and usage; math, which includes computation skills and application of math concepts; and reading, which includes vocabulary, word analysis, and comprehension. It also measures achievement in science, social studies, and information resources. The Cognitive Abilities Test measures a student’s current level of verbal, quantitative, and non-verbal (special) reasoning and the ability to process information. The results of this test are important when considered both separately, and in conjunction with the achievement test. Standing alone, scores on the CogAT give insight into the relative strengths of a student—for example, does he possess a stronger reasoning ability in the verbal area than in the quantitative area? Used together, the scores give insight into the relationship between reasoning ability and achievement—for example, is a strong verbal reasoning ability reflected in the reading and language scores on the ITBS, and in daily schoolwork in language arts? If not, a teacher or a parent may wonder, “Why not?” Test publishers carefully develop questions in each subject tested. Test questions measure a wide variety of knowledge and skills, but do not include everything that could be asked about a subject at each grade level. No student is expected to know all the answers, but the more questions a student can answer correctly, the higher the score will be in each sub-test. Scores from all of the subtests are combined to comprise what is known as a composite score. The next piece of information is often misunderstood: Standardized test scores are reported in percentiles. Many of the tests and quizzes your children take outside of standardized testing are scored in percentages. They are not the same thing. If a student earns 80% on his Friday spelling test of twenty words, that means he or she got sixteen correct and four incorrect. In standardized testing, if a student scores at the 80th percentile in the spelling sub-test, it means that the student did as well as or better than 80% of other students who took the test. This score actually means the student scored in the top 20% of students who took the test! A score in the 76th percentile is a very strong score! On standardized tests, the 50th percentile is exactly average, and the average range extends from the 24th to 76th percentile. It is a good idea to save report cards and test reports each year to track your child’s progress from year to year. If scores remain fairly consistent year after year, your child is making appropriate progress academically. If scores seem very inconsistent one year when compared to several others, think back on what might have been going on in your child’s life or in the family around test time. Talk to the teacher, either at the fall conference or a special one, for other clues about what might have caused the deviation from what has become the “norm” for your child. Sometimes unavoidable things happen that result in an atypical testing experience and an unusually low set of scores, but one set of low scores is not particularly significant when it is inconsistent with the student’s “typical” performance over a number of years. Consistently low scores and poor daily performance in school might signal a need for further evaluation to rule out a specific learning disability. The results of that evaluation may provide critical information that can be helpful to the school, in understanding how your child learns best, and to you, in working in partnership with the school. Finally, remember, the standardized test is only one of many indicators of your child’s achievement and abilities. It is a “snapshot” taken on a given day and it does not provide the depth and nuance that is best experienced by examining the whole child the other 364 days of year!
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