Does anyone have any insight? I'd appreciate anything anyone has to say.
Well, my dds took the Terra Novas for a few years at two different schools. The schools were also reluctant to show the scores to the parents. So one year we would get one page of information, the next year, we might get an additional page, the next year maybe only a xerox of one side of the page. So I guess my first question to you is what page(s) did you get?
One of the pages I have shows Performance by Content Area -- broad performance on reading, language, Math, Total, Science and Social Studies. The next page is a different home report with five subtests that measure cognitive ability. So this is just a little like iq testing and the content area report is more like WJII; One year the school got fancy and hand wrote the "anticipated score" the child would have gotten on the achievement section, based on their cognitive score. I don't think they were supposed to do that....
The next school provided us with an Individual Profile report with percentiles/GE/percentile range for 14 different subtests & composites.
Finally, they provided another page with 10 subtests, each with 3to 8 sub-sub tests. This is where you can see how your child did on geometry versus problem solving or editing skills versus sentence structure. Everything is done in percentiles, and OPI - "an estimate of the number of items that a student could be expected to answer if there had been 100 questions.."
If you could get the reports, you would be able to see if the 99 had a little asterix with it indicating it to be a maximum score. I'm guessing it was.
A little explanation that came with the reports:
"A percentile rank refers to the percentage of students in the norm group who fall below a particular point, not the percentage of items answered correctly. also note that a scale of percentile ranks in not composed of equal measuring units. A given difference between percentile ranks is larger in terms of scale score units near the ends of the range than it is near the middle. For example, the difference in scale scores between percentile ranks 90 and 95 is much greater than the difference between percentile ranks of 50 and 55.
I agree with Dottie about the GE numbers. The report bends over backwards trying to explain how to not misinterpret them, without explaining how they are at all useful. I don't know how it is helpful to know that a child performed as well as an average 11th grader would have performed on the same 2nd grade test. The information that came with ours suggested that parents not be given GE's because of their confusing nature.
So...long post. I know you want more information, but I'm not sure you'll get it from the Terra Novas. The cognitive stuff might be helpful/interesting, if you can get it from the teacher or school. I don't know anything about the Kbit, sorry, but it sounds like it might be more persuasive.
Your child's scores, nonetheless, are very high. My dd had scores not too different from these, and the school district suggested that we have her tested with the WISC, etc.
How is it that you got the scores from the teacher? If she only gave it to your family, maybe she was trying to tell you something?
apologies if I am repeating information in Aculady's link; I couldn't get it to open..
