Understanding Iowa Assessments

This week we will send home information regarding our recently completed Iowa Assessments including a letter from me, a list of our school averages compared to other schools in the Diocese and the State of Florida, and your child's individual score report. Overall, I am pleased with our score results. As you will see, we continue to out-perform the Diocese and other schools in the state of Florida--an accomplishment of which our entire school community should be proud. The question I think many people ask, though, is "What does this test really mean?"

To answer that question, you have to know that standardized tests can fall into two main categories: criterion-referenced and norm-referenced. This psychology website has an info-graphic to help explain the difference. A simple explanation is:

Criterion-referenced tests measure how well an individual student knows a specified amount of material (think semester exams or the SAT).

Norm-referenced tests measure how many students scored lower than your child on that test (think Iowa or CTBS).

Even simpler: criterion reference tells how much a student knows and norm reference tells how they compare.  Since the Iowa is a norm-referenced test, I'll focus on these types of tests. Click the link on this site to read specific information from the University of Iowa regarding how results should be interpreted.

This begs the question, why should we be concerned about how well our students do on a test made in Iowa? The test is produced by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in conjunction with the Iowa Testing Program. It remains one of the most extensively researched comprehensive tests of basic skills. Its results are normed against a national sample of students. This was last done in 2011 -- which is an important note for interpreting results and making comparisons.

The test results we receive DO NOT compare the performance of our students against other students taking the test in a given year. It compares the results of the student against the performance of the normed group in 2011 with slight adjustments made each year. This is why you can have multiple schools and districts claiming raised test scores or why a decrease in one area for a school does not necessarily mean an increase in others. It is also important to note that norm-referenced tests are designed to create a bell curve, with the majority of students scoring at the 50th percentile and fewer students scoring above or below it.

Given this information, how should you, as parents, use it and how do we use it as educators? In a word, CAREFULLY. As a parent, avoid overgeneralizing student performance. Look at growth over time and performance from year to year. Celebrate maintaining a score or improvement. If a score lowers, look at specific skills for improvement. Keep in mind that answering one or two more questions correctly in a section can change the national percentile rank by almost 10 points!

As educators, we look to see how groups of students perform. Individual scores, being a comparison, should be used to form instructional groups within a class, allowing for more differentiated instruction. The Iowa scores are also measured against other benchmark testing (STAR Math and STAR Reading) to measure similarities or differences. Rather than using the results to inform what we teach, we use them to inform how we teach to different groups of students, with the goal of providing the right amount of challenge to all learners. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or Mrs. Metz.