Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Help Understanding ITBS Scores?

Have you, however, given the same child both the grade level ITBS and an above level ITBS and seen if the SS is similar on the two different tests? That's what I'm doubting for the reasons others have probably articulated better than have I.

Don't worry about that at all. I don't take it as bragging and I don't mean to be argumentative! I'm just a skeptic and have enough testing data on my own kids as well as some testing background myself that I'm not really sure that these types of extrapolations can be made.

I'd totally agree with this. I've tested kids on the SAT-10 before and have seen something similar.

The thing is that the MAP and the WJ-III are of the go-until-you-can't-do-anymore variety, so one would expect a GE on one of them to be real--meaning that the 4th grader with a GE of 8.9 (94th percentile as compared with 4th graders) will have taken essentially the same test as the 8th grader with the GE of 8.9 (50th percentile as compared with 8th graders). My kids get the same GEs on these types of tests as they do on the ITBS/ITED. While this is admittedly a small sample size, I do believe that the test makers actually design the tests so that they will correlate fairly well with one another. All of these tests are attempting to measure the same reality and so you would expect the correlation.

Now, I do think that a 3rd grader taking the ITBS intended for 8th graders might run into problems with being able to finish in the time allotted.

I know that psychologists and others who are tasked with explaining GEs to parents always say not to pay any attention to them. And that's true, one shouldn't use GEs for placement because they don't indicate mastery. They only indicate the pathetic state of education in this country.

We only got GEs on the WJ-III and percentiles for the MAPS, ITBS, etc. so I haven't been able to directly compare how the GEs would have lined up for my kids, but that is interesting.

I would also say that I don't know that super high GEs are only due to our educational system being broken. These types of tests are often multiple choice and don't cover nearly as broad of content as does curriculum nor do they ask children to, say, write essays, develop a thesis, apply learned material, etc.

For instance, one of my girls had GEs of 18+ on various parts of the writing and reading tests on the WJ-III when she was a young 7 y/o. While she's very good at language arts and consistently tested in the 99th percentile on tests like MAPs, SRI lexile, etc., I am quite certain that she was not at a post graduate level in anything at that age. What she was was able to apply what she did know well enough to answer multiple choice questions well, write simple sentences in a grammatically correct manner, etc. This translated to some very high GEs due to test limitations probably more than low academic standards in the US.

OP, by the way, I'm sorry to have taken your thread so off topic!

I am not exactly clear on what the 18+ GE on the WJ-III means. Was the test really normed with graduate students? Or did they use nationally representative 24 year olds? Because there is a huge difference.

I doubt that they normed the WJ with either grad students or 24 y/os. I'd guess that, just like the ITBS, etc., she got as high of a score as possible for that age, which was then labeled as a number that was much too high for her actual functioning at that age. However, if they really normed it with 18+ students, they really should have been students with 18+ yrs of education not just 18+ years of life beyond kindergarten.

Now I'm curious. I'll have to go look at the norming sample info, if it's available, for these tests. I'm curious if they really gave the 2nd grade ITBs to 12th graders to get GEs of 12 as a possibility, for instance. I'll let you know

I haven't had time to go try to find norming sample info for any of these tests yet, but these two quotes of yours suddenly popped into my mind. Wouldn't these two observations contradict one another? If a kid can get a 90th percentile+ score on the 4th grade ITBS, for instance, by knowing nothing beyond 4th grade material (which I agree with b/c I've seen that as well), I'd expect the GE for that 4th grader to be something like maybe 6th grade. So, if we then give that 4th grader the 6th grade ITBS, I wouldn't expect him to get a 50th percentile score for 6th grade b/c he knows little to nothing beyond 4th grade material. Am I making sense here, lol?

This is becoming rather esoteric!

I pulled those numbers off of the NWEA RIT Scale Norms (MAP test) report. So a fourth grader at the 94th percentile will have a GE of 8.9 (or 8th grade in the spring) and an 8th grader with the same RIT score (who took an equivalent test) will be at the 50th percentile and have the same GE of 8.9. The ITBS data that I have (in the form of multiple score reports spanning grades K-12) seems to correlate with the MAP data.

So in this case, presumably the fourth grader with the 8.9 GE would score in the 50th percentile on the 8th grade ITBS--assuming that he could finish the test.

The key here is that average 8th graders have not mastered 8th grade material, they've mastered 4th grade material.

Of course, the 8th grader has more life experience and probably does know more than the 4th grader about many things. Just not about the things being tested.

All right, I can see that it's at least not impossible for the standard scores to be truly standard across grades. The lower grades on non-adaptive tests just have to have different, appropriately aligned ceilings. This is still counterintuitive for me in some ways, but it helps to remember that there's probably a fair amount of one-grade-higher content on each test, with the upper-level content dwindling according to the grade differential. So, for example, if average eighth graders have only mastered fourth grade math, maybe highly capable third graders still do well on roughly fourth-grade math questions presented on the third-grade test, in addition to getting a relative boost from better general test-taking skills and higher accuracy on what they know.

I wonder what percentile actually starts to show some expertise with that grade level's material. 60th? 70th? Whatever it is, that's the bottom percentile that should be discussed in terms of placement, along with whatever percentile is chosen to indicate mastery. Out-of-level 50th percentile scores just aren't very meaningful, and are misleading because many people make the incorrect assumption that a child scoring at that percentile could function like an average child in that higher-level class. Sure, the student could at least for a while get the same standardized test scores, but at some point would be missing important foundational knowledge.

My feeling for a long time has been that mastery/expertise with a particular grade level's material is indicated by a percentile rank of 90 and above. I based this on my knowledge of what is supposed to be taught at various grade levels, what is actually on the tests, and how my children have done on various tests when I am sure of their level of mastery.

But until a few months ago I had never seen anything official that confirmed this until I found this in the Iowa Acceleration Scale Manual (3rd edition): "In assessing achievement as it relates to making a decision about acceleration, earning a grade-level score that results in a ranking in the 90th-94th percentile indicates mastery (achievement) of the grade-level content."

So for making placement decisions, I would use the 90th percentile and above on an out of level test.