Worried about DD's standardized test scores - large discrepancies

[knit247]

I thought I understood what all of those stanine and grade equivalent scores meant, but come to find out I was wrong!  DD#1 has taken the Stanford 10 three times now: 3rd, 4th, and 6th grades.  Although her scores always looked great to my untrained eye, I had a feeling something was up this year.  Things just didn't look right to me.  When I started to look into what exactly all of those nos. meant, I quickly became confused and overwhelmed.  Luckily my DD has a hs friend whose mother has a M.Ed. and is a Certified Educational Therapist.  She graciously explained a lot about my daughter's scores to me this afternoon, but now that I am home I am confused yet again and hope someone here can give me direction.

 

Firstly, my DD's GE vocab and comprehension scores are very far apart, 11.2 and 7.5 respectively.  In 4th grade they were also about 4 GE apart, and in 3rd they were about 1 GE apart.  Why would her vocab be so much higher than her comprehension?  If she's not comprehending what she reads, how is she getting the vocab down?  What can I do to bridge this gap?  FWIW, my DD doesn't like to read -never has - and my friend suggested that we need to find out why she doesn't like to why she is not comprehending...  Any ideas here?

 

Also, her listening skills are good at GE 10.5, but her thinking skills are not nearly as good, at GE 6.7.  Again, 4 GE apart.  But on her 3rd and 4th grade tests, the two were less than 1 GE apart.  This is very confusing to me.  What does this really mean - and how can I help her improve?

 

Finally, her verbal and non-verbal sores show a huge discrepancy: her SAI (School Ability Index) shows a 108 in verbal, and a 71 in non-verbal.  My friend said that a discrepancy of >9 really needs to be looked at.  Hers is at 25!  Her 4th grade scores, however, showed just a 4 pt difference 97 and 101, respectively.

 

Can anyone shed light on this for me?  I am going to have my friend test DD in the fall, and I know more information will come from that...but in the meantime, I'd love a "second opinion" or suggestions on what could possibly be going on here and how I can improve as her teacher.  Thanks so much! 

[Nscribe]

It has been a long while since I last looked at the Stanford's score report, but by chance does it provide the number of questions in each unit, number the student attempted and number the student got correct?  One problem, especially with items like vocabulary/spelling can be that the number of questions is so small. 

 

Specifically with vocabulary versus comprehension, while it might seem a student who has a large vocabulary should comprehend as well, the skills employed for success are not the same.  Generally (very generally), vocabulary assessments with multile choice formats are allowing a student who may have familiarity with a word or word decoding skills to compare and contrast a small number of options and select or eliminate available choices.  Reading comprehension, although still multiple choice, demands the student apply an array of skills.  For example, a word may have a connotation and a denotation, context may play a large part in determining which prevails as important in the passage.  Or another example, when reading a passage and then responding to questions to test comprehension, a student may need to employ an understanding of satire versus literal prose.  Said another way, knowing words and their meanings is only one of many skills that in comprehension of reading.

 

GE is not the most reliable indicator of ability.  On many assessments, the percentiles are more helpful, but still not great.

[Slipper]

I agree. I wouldn't really worry about GE. I always look at what percentile they fall into and go from there. I would think that she would fall into roughly the same percentile rankings throughout the years unless there is a drastic change.

[knit247]

TY both :thumbup:   'Talked to another friend tonight, and I am not as worried as I was.  We had a LOT of difficult issues going on this year that were not school-related, but greatly affected my teaching time / their learning time.  I really need to take that into consideration.  And - like I have told my girls, these tests are not for me to evaluate them, they are mainly to evaluate myself.  I see the areas that I need to focus on, and now I need to make a plan to make that happen.  Thanks again for your replies.

[Penelope]

I think it is harder for these tests to mean anything as the students get older if they are average or above, because as they creep closer and closer to the test ceiling (twelfth grade) even one question makes an enormous difference.

[Hunter]

My younger son's results were even further apart than that. No amount of work on my part ever narrowed the difference, but rather increased it. When he was in PS, the scores were closer, but that was because he didn't have the high scores then.

 

I'd do a few inference lessons with her. When I was a child I scored low on comprehension tests, but know that I comprehended independent readings amazingly well. When being tested I approached the material differently. I skimmed the material looking for a quick answer, that wasn't explicitly stated in the text, and I didn't know why. I asked adults about this strange thing on the tests, and they said they knew what I was talking about and yes, that type of question was "hard". They didn't name the skill or teach me how to do it. I continued to score low on comprehension. Sigh!

 

The only reading comprehension skill I teach is inference. I don't see improvement in student performance after teaching the other skills.

 

Some things just ARE and don't need to be remediated, especially if none of the scores are below grade level. If it makes you feel better, as a 5th grader my son scored spelling and mechanics at maybe grades 3 and 4 I think, and I think it was maybe reading or vocabulary that was a 10 or 11 or something like that, and everything else was 12.9+. Then the school board paid for an IQ test the next year and it was even worse. After that they didn't want anything to do with us, and didn't even return my phonecalls and paperwork, so I just stopped sending it in. :lol: The tester said I was doing an amazing job and didn't know how he was getting the high scores, but sure did know where the low ones came from. :lol:

 

The tester was anti-homeschooling but recommended MY kid stay homeschooled. He really didn't know anything about 2E kids. It was the mid 90s. So I don't know if the IQ test was accurate or not, and didn't worry too much about it, and kept doing what I was doing. He was IQ tested during my religious phase and I was calm back then, before I lost my faith AGAIN, and got all riled up again for high school.

 

Don't stress over it! Homeschooled kids are going to score high in some areas, because they have the chance to. And no matter what YOU do, some of them are going to score low in some areas, just because.