One could miss some easy items at an inopportune moment (say early in the item set), and be directed to a lower level set of items, receiving a lowered estimate of their true skills.
Does anyone know if teachers are able to review the actual questions and answers that resulted in a given score? DD's teacher has sent home her STAR "Instructional Planning Report" which lists as grade 3 (I'm assuming that's the baseline grade?) with a SS of 881.
I haven't the faintest what the benchmark was because this information appears to rely on color viewing, and my printout is black and white. And it rates her as "grade 5" in Operations and Algebraic Thinking, which seems about right, but then "grade 2" for Measurement and Data. The other 3 areas are all either grade 3 or 4. I'm thinking she probably screwed up or wasn't paying attention to some measurement skills because she certainly CAN "draw a picture graph or bar graph to represent set data" well above 2nd grade level, and add/subtract within 1,000 when she bothers to use a pencil on paper and pay attention to what she's doing. But realistically I have no information whatsoever on HOW she got these scores.
I have no idea how she managed to get an apparently above-grade-level-expectations score when her actual results in each category are all over the map....
