ED470589 2002-10-00 Using

Standardized Test Data To Guide

Instruction and Intervention. ERIC

Digest.

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Using Standardized Test Data To Guide Instruction and Intervention.

ERIC Digest................................................................... 1

USING TEST SCORES TO REVISE GROUP INSTRUCTION......... 2

REVISING GROUP INSTRUCTION:AN EXAMPLE...................... 2

USING TEST SCORES TO DESIGN INDIVIDUALIZED

INTERVENTION...........................................................4

CONCLUSION.................................................................. 5

REFERENCES.................................................................. 6

ERIC Identifier: ED470589

Publication Date: 2002-10-00

Author: Mertler, Craig A.

Source: ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation Washington DC.

Using Standardized Test Data To Guide

Instruction and Intervention. ERIC Digest.

THIS DIGEST WAS CREATED BY ERIC, THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

ED470589 2002-10-00 Using Standardized Test Data To Guide Instruction and

Intervention. ERIC Digest.

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When teachers review test score reports, they may find the sheer volume of information

presented overwhelming, and they may also be unsure how to interpret and use results

in the classroom. While the idea of data-driven decision-making is not new, it does

require a special skill to focus on a few key pieces of information from a test and use

them to make instructional changes. This Digest addresses two ways that classroom

teachers can use the results of standardized tests: (1) to revise instruction for entire

classes or courses and (2) to develop specific intervention strategies for individual

students.

USING TEST SCORES TO REVISE GROUP

INSTRUCTION

Test publishing companies typically provide classroom-level reports to enable teachers

to see how a group of students performs across the curriculum. Even if a group of

students has moved on by the time score reports are available, teachers should

examine class-level results as a source of information for revising curriculum and

instruction for the next class. Content areas or subtests in which high percentages of

children are performing below average indicate areas of deficiency.

Once teachers have noted and prioritized deficiencies, they may consider one or more

of the following questions:

* Where is this content addressed in our district's curriculum?

* At what point in the school are these concepts/skills taught?

* How are the students taught these concepts/skills?

* How are students required to demonstrate that they have mastered the

concepts/skills? In other words, how are they assessed in the classroom?

Answers to these questions should point the way to new methods of instruction,

reinforcement, or assessment (Mertler, 2001, 2003). They may also introduce evidence

that the curriculum and the tests are not in alignment.

REVISING GROUP INSTRUCTION:AN EXAMPLE

While reports from state tests and tests from commercial publishers vary in format, most

feature certain common elements. Riverside, which publishes the Iowa Tests of Basic

Skills, provides an illustrative sample class performance profile at the following Web

address: http://www.riverpub.com/products/group/itbs_a/scoring.html#grpperm

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Page 2 of 7 ED470589 2002-10-00 Using Standardized Test Data To Guide Instruction and

Intervention. ERIC Digest.
This report, like many others, offers both norm-referenced test results, which allow

performance comparisons with other groups of students taking the test, and

criterion-referenced information, which provides data such as how many questions

students attempted and how many correct answers they gave for each category of

question. Language skills might, for example, involve subtests of spelling, capitalization,

punctuation, and usage; mathematics might break down to concepts, problem solving,

data interpretation, and computation. Sometimes you'll also be able to see the number

of questions devoted to each area within a subtest (e.g., in the area of mathematics

concepts, how many questions deal with number properties, with algebra, with

geometry, with measurement, and with estimation).

Typical scores reported might also include the following:

Standard (or "Scale") score (SS): A score that has been transformed mathematically

and put on a scale to allow comparisons with different forms and levels of a test.

Grade equivalent (GE) Score: A norm-referenced score that indicates the grade and

month of the school year for which a score is average. The average score for a fifth

grader being tested in the seventh month of the school year would be 5.7. If a child has

a GE score well above his or her grade in school--a fifth grader with a GE of 9.1 on a

reading subtest, for example--it doesn't mean that the child can do ninth-grade work, but

rather, that he or she scored the same as an average entering ninth grader would if the

ninth grader took the fifth-grade test.

National percentile rank (NPR): the percentage of students in the norm group that

performed at or below a particular performance level. It's important to note the group to

which students are being compared. Some test publishers provide separate norms for,

say, large urban school districts across the country, or Catholic schools, while also

providing norms based on a representative sample of test-takers across the country,

and/or other groups taking the test in the state.

Normal curve equivalent (NCE): A normalized standardized score with a mean of 50

and a standard deviation of 21.06 resulting in a near equal interval scale from 0 to 99.

The NCE was developed by RMC Research Corporation in 1976 to measure the

effectiveness of the Title I Program across the United States and is often used to

measure gains over time.

National stanine (NS): Stanine scores range from 1 to 9, with a score of 5 representing

an average range. The percentage of scores at each stanine level in a normalized

standard score scale is 4, 7, 12, 17, 20, 17, 12, 7, and 4, respectively. Percentile rank

scores provide similar, though more precise, information. For example, a percentile rank

near the middle of the distribution (e.g., 45 to 55) will be roughly equivalent to a stanine

score of 5.

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A class test report might also present a graphic illustrating confidence bands, which

represent the margins of error for individual subtests. Studying them will permit a

teacher to get a quick overview of a class' performance because non-overlapping bands

indicate that scores are truly or significantly different from each other. For example, the

students in a class might perform significantly lower on "Vocabulary" than on "Reading

Comprehension."

It is helpful to identify the subtest(s) upon which a particular class achieves at a national

percentile rank of below 50 in order to make these content areas targets for possible

instructional change. Alternatively, teachers might look at the skill areas in which high

percentages of students scored in the bottom 25 percent or low percentages of students

scored in the top 25 percent. Again, teacher would want to rank order, or otherwise

prioritize, these areas for possible revision of instruction.

USING TEST SCORES TO DESIGN

INDIVIDUALIZED INTERVENTION

Standardized test data may also be used very effectively in order to guide the

development of individualized intervention strategies. First, however, it is important to

remember that general achievement tests are intended to survey basic skills across a

broad domain of content (Chase, 1999). On almost any standardized achievement test,

a given subtest may consist of as few as five or six items. The fewer the number of

items on a subtest, the less reliable the scores will be (Airasian, 2000, 2001). Careless

errors or lucky guesses by students may substantially alter the score on that subtest,

especially if scores are reported as percentages of items answered correctly or as

percentile ranks. Therefore, it is important not only to examine the raw scores and

percentile ranks, but also the total number of items possible on a given test prior to

making any intervention decisions (Mertler, 2003).

Nearly all publishers of standardized achievement tests provide both criterion- and

norm-referenced results on individual student reports. Many results are reported in

terms of average performance (i.e., below average, average, above average). It is again

important to remember that "average" simply means that half of the norm group scored

above and half scored below that particular score (Gallagher, 1998). Teachers should

take great care to avoid the overinterpretation of test scores (Airasian, 2000, 2001).

The process for examining test results in order to help guide the development of

intervention strategies for individual students is essentially the same as for the whole

class. First, the teacher identifies any content areas or subtests in which the student

performed below average. Second, the teacher establishes priorities among these

areas, selecting a workable number of content areas, perhaps one or two, to serve as

the focus of an intervention. Third, the teacher identifies new or different resource

materials, methods of instruction, reinforcement, and/or assessment in order to meet

the needs of the individual student. The success of this intervention may be monitored

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Intervention. ERIC Digest.
both through classroom assessments and on future test scores. Given the length of time

it takes for test scores to become available, it may be that a teacher at the next grade

level will have to follow through on the intervention.

Designing Intervention Strategies: An Example

Individual score reports, like classroom performance reports, tend to contain both normand criterion-referenced information. The results may include scaled scores,

grade-equivalent scores, national stanines, normal curve equivalent scores, national

percentiles, and national percentile bands as defined above. The national percentile

ranks and associated confidence bands allow the teacher to see how well a particular

student performed in relation to the national norm group on the various subtests. An

individual skill report might also include a breakdown of how many items the test

included in each skill area, how many the student attempted, how many he or she got

correct, and how this performance compared to the national norm group.

By way of illustration, readers may wish to view a score report for a fictitious student,

Mary Sanders, who took the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. This score report

(http://www.riverpub.com/ products/ group/itbs_a/scoring.html#indperm) shows

percentile rank scores ranging from a low of 20 ("Capitalization") to a high of 71

("Reading Comprehension" and "Listening"), with the student's performance

substantially below the norm group in several areas, including "Capitalization," Word

Analysis," "Vocabulary," "Math Concepts and Estimation," and "Math Computation."

These are potential areas the classroom teacher would want to target for possible

interventions. Further examination of the "Math Concepts and Estimation" portion in the

criterion-referenced section pinpoint Mary's difficulties to the items that dealt with

"Algebra." Other areas in which Mary scored in the "Low" category include "Punctuation:

Commas," "Math: Problem Solving: Approaches and Procedures," and "Social Studies:

Economics." Again, this information would likely prove most essential in designing an

intervention plan for Mary. Teachers can perform similar analyses on individual score

reports from their own state tests or other commercial tests. The important point to

remember is to use the data to identify specific areas of difficulty in order to plan a

well-targeted intervention

CONCLUSION

Teachers can learn to use empirical test data to assist in instructional decision-making

for their classes or for individual students. To avoid being overwhelmed by data,

especially since much of the information provided on test reports is analogous, teachers

might wish to begin their inquiry by focusing on such scores as national percentile ranks

and their associated confidence bands. Interpreting standardized test data for use in

making instructional decisions does take some practice. Limiting the data to be

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ED470589 2002-10-00 Using Standardized Test Data To Guide Instruction and

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interpreted and understanding what those scores really mean makes the process more

efficient and allows teachers to make valuable use of their students' standardized test

data to bring about increased achievement.

REFERENCES

Airasian, P. W. (2000). Assessment in the classroom: A concise approach (2nd ed.).

Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Airasian, P. W. (2001). Classroom assessment: Concepts and applications (4th ed.).

Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Chase, C. I. (1999). Contemporary assessment for educators. New York: Longman.

Gallagher, J. D. (1998). Classroom assessment for teachers. Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Merrill.

Iowa Tests of Basic Skills Individual Performance Profile. (2002). Retrieved July 9,

2002, from http://www.riverpub.com/products/group/itbs_a/scoring.html#indperm

Mertler, C. A. (2001). Interpreting proficiency test data: Guiding instruction and

intervention. Unpublished manuscript (inservice training materials), Bowling Green State

University. Mertler, C. A. (2003). Classroom assessment: A practical guide for

educators. Los Angeles, CA: Pyrczak.

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This publication was prepared with funding from the Office of Education Research and

Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, under contract ED-99-CO-0032. The

opinions expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies or

the U.S. Department of Education. Permission is granted to copy and distribute this

ERIC/AE Digest.

Title: Using Standardized Test Data To Guide Instruction and Intervention. ERIC

Digest.

Document Type: Information Analyses---ERIC Information Analysis Products (IAPs)

(071); Information Analyses---ERIC Digests (Selected) in Full Text (073);

Available From: ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, 1129 Shriver

Laboratory, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. Tel: 800-464-3742 (Toll

Free).

Descriptors: Elementary Secondary Education, Intervention, Research Reports,

Standardized Tests, Teacher Role, Test Interpretation, Test Results, Test Use

Identifiers: ERIC Digests

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