hello, I am hoping someone out there can help decipher a score my daughter had on her ITBS testing at school. She is in third grade, although a young 8, she has an August birthday. Her usage and expression in language arts showed to be at an 8.9 grade level equivalent. Her other scores varied, from a little above grade level to several 5th grade GE. The usage and expression one was such a dramatic difference between her actual grade level and GE, so I am just trying to get some insight. She has not been IDed as gifted, in first grade she did not pass one creativity test (where the teacher fills out a form about the child, not really a test). Honestly as long as she is happy, does well in life, I am fine if she is not considered gifted. I figured maybe someone here could explain what the 8.9 test score means, if anything! TIA!

Wmiz77, did you get any other information than the grade equivalents (e.g. percentile rank, etc.)? I grabbed my oldest's old ITBS scores from 3rd grade b/c she was the same age as your dd at that grade. Her scores included the following tests:

Vocab, reading comprehension (these two together made up the reading total)
Word Analysis, listening, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, usage and expression (these made up the Language total)

Concepts & estimation, problem solving & data interpretation, math computation (these three made up the math total)

All of the above combined to make up a core total

Social Studies

Science

Maps & diagrams, Reference materials (these two made up the Sources of information)

ALL of the above made up the "composite"

We got a national percentile rank for each of the above tests as well as each of the "total"s and the composite. We, unfortunately, did not get grade equivalents so I don't know how my dd's percentiles would translate to GEs on that one test. My general feel, though, is that percentiles up to the 90th, especially if they are not across the board, can be accommodated in a reasonable classroom unless it is unusually low performing.

Do you know if any of her total scores, core total, or composite were that high? One stand out strength often isn't enough to get acceleration. Usually schools want to see the "total" (reading, language, or whatever) at the 95th percentile or so, which if I had to guess, would be somewhere around a GE of 6th grade for an early 3rd grader.

Let me preface this by stating that I'm HG/HG+, though I've got at least one S-B in my past that would argue that I'd have been DYS material--

my ITBS scores (back in the day) would have been, as Cricket notes, broken down into subsections and scored with percentiles as well as GE's.

When I took it in third grade, I do know that my dad was blown away by my GE's-- which were all 9th-13th grade (what 13th grade is, I do not know... but at least then, this indicated "post secondary" as opposed to "struggling to finish high school curriculum" ) My mom, an educator herself, quickly talked him down by pointing out that being the smart at third grade material didn't make a 12th grader some kind of genius. LOL.

The percentiles were a different story. THOSE were the real news.
My percentiles on that third grade ITBS would have been 98's and higher across the board.

My parents were offered a grade skip-- but opted to instead place me in the lower grade in several consecutive split level classrooms, and follow with middle and high school GT programming. (I continued to earn 98th percentiles and higher on every other standardized test I've ever taken, btw.)



My daughter, who is PG, has never taken the ITBS, but on a similar, nationally normed battery, scored straight 99.9 percentiles-- taken two years out of level when she was six. She has continued to test on normed tests (state testing, etc) 97th-99.9th percentiles for the following seven years-- again, testing 2-4 years out of level.

I mention this anecdote because she and I are both people who naturally "test well" (so actually this kind of nationally normed assessment IS reasonably accurate for both of us) and there is a big difference once you move out past the second standard deviation of the cognitive ability curve. There is a world of difference between a child at 95th percentiles and one at 98th-99th and one like my DD at the 99.9th across the board.

No way am I cognitively in her league, and I was more or less fine in 'regular' classrooms. With a few tweaks, that is.

Neither my DD nor myself were remotely happy in undifferentiated environments, however, and this is not the case for someone like my DH, who is more along the lines of 95th percentiles in some areas and 97-99th in others.

Percentiles. Yes. Much more useful info. HTH.

In looking at my son's ITBS scores, I'm guessing that GE 8.9 corresponds to a standard score of 250ish. This corresponds to percentiles in the mid 90s for spring of 4th grade. What this means in reality is that your daughter has likely mastered 4th grade material and is ready for 5th grade work.

The thing to be careful of here is that the ITBS does not work like the MAPS. A standard score of 250, say, is not the same for a 3rd grader as it is for a 4th grader or a 5th grader. You really cannot compare across grade levels on the ITBS. The NCE, SS, and GE are all relative to how other kids would have tested or did test on that one grade level test only.

The other thing to consider is that this GE of 8.9 is only on one piece of the language test. If her overall language test/composite language was similarly high, I'd agree that she's needing more in that one area. FWIW, the language test primarily looks at something similar to the English test on the EXPLORE, but for a younger grade of course in this instance. A very high score on the language test indicates a kid who is very good with written conventions (spelling, capitalization, sentence structure, etc.) but may or may not indicate a child who needs acceleration in language arts.

I'd tend to believe that acceleration in LA or GT placement in that area should depend on the content & depth of the child's writing and reading moreso than his/her English conventions achievement.

I'm putting this out there not b/c I believe that the OP's kid is not gifted, just b/c I think that caution is warranted before making decisions about what a child needs based on one high area on one test.

That is true to some extent, and I would certainly do further (out of level) testing before proposing anything like formal subject acceleration in a school setting, but a standard score of 250 is a standard score of 250 and it is very likely that the child would obtain that same SS if given the out of level test.


My main point is that a GE of 8.9 is not as out there as it seems when viewed in the light of subject mastery.

I don't think that it is on the ITBS for the reason mon gave above. A SS of 250 on a 3rd grade version of the ITBS is not the same as a SS of 250 on the 4th or 5th grade version. The GE and SS both refer to how children in the norming sample scored when given the 3rd grade version, which differs from other grade versions.

On some other tests like NWEA MAPs, the rit scores do compare across grade levels b/c the test is identical regardless of your grade or age. The student just moves up to harder questions as s/he answers questions correctly.

Edit to add: In looking at how the ITBS is scored further, I want to clarify. While standard scores apparently can be compared across grade levels to some extent (i.e. a SS of 244 would be the 50th percentile for the reading total for an 8th grader and, presumably, a much higher percentile for the reading total for a 3rd grader), they are still based on different tests. The 8th grade test, for instance, gives much harder questions than the 3rd grade test. So, if a 3rd grader got a 244 (answered correctly very difficult questions for a 3rd grader) on the 3rd grade test, I don't believe that it stands to reason that the same 3rd grader, if given the 8th grade test, would answer as well as the average (50th percentile) 8th grader, achieving the same SS of 244 when answering much harder questions.

This is an interesting question, Kai and Cricket2. People here often opine that high grade equivalents reported for tests like the ITBS just indicate how an upper-level student would have done on the lower-level test. If that's true, it does imply that the standard scores are supposed to be standardized across grade levels.

On the other hand, I have trouble believing that a lower-level student would do as well as the grade equivalents might indicate on a test leveled many grades above, for example that a third grader who gets the standard score of an average ninth grader would get the same score on the ninth grade test. There must be some above-level questions on each grade to give a little headroom, but this has to be limited; I doubt that too many ninth-grade-level questions appear on the third-grade test. The larger the grade differential, too, the fewer questions at the lower level will appear on the higher-level test.

Let's imagine a hypothetical perfectly accurate third grade math student who has been exposed to no concepts introduced in the fourth grade or above, and who won't learn new concepts on the test. A high achiever and hard worker, but not extremely smart, say. I doubt that there are so many third-grade questions on the ninth-grade test that even a perfect score on those would give the standard score of an average ninth grader, who probably will find the third grade questions easy and get at least some of the rest correct too. Now, some high-scoring third graders will be able to learn during a test, and some will have been exposed to higher than third-grade concepts as well, but the bigger the grade differential, the less likely I think it will be that a high grade equivalent will actually be accurate.

I have none of the statistical thinking tools needed to analyze these issues, but I do know that testing experts often regard grade equivalents as less accurate the further out they're cast. I think it's likely that Kai is right that the standard scores are intended to really be standard across grades, but I also would bet that they aren't, at least when applied in an upward direction across the entire range. Thus we get incredulous questions every so often on this from parents new to testing or the site, and they're right to be incredulous.

I'm basing my statements about this on having administered the ITBS intended for grades 1-8 and the ITED intended for grades 9-12 *and* having actually taken all of the tests I've administered myself. As a homeschooler, I also taught students at levels K-12 in language arts/English and math from the K level through Algebra II. I have also had my kids take the MAP and the WJ-III at various times through the years.

I'm not mentioning all of this because I'm trying to impress anyone. Over the years, as a homeschooler, I've been truly interested in how my kids' achievement on standardized tests corresponds to their day-to-day achievement on their schoolwork.

What I've found is that *mastering* the material at a particular level (and not knowing any more than that) seems to correspond to placing in the 90th percentile and above for that level. I base this on knowing what is taught at a particular level, what is on the test, and what I know my kids know. When my kids have taken the MAP or WJ-III their GE scores do match up well with their ITBS scores.

What is frightening and depressing is what GE really means. The 8.9 GE we've been discussing means that the average 8th grader in the 50th percentile has mastered 4th grade work. And the GE of 13+ which so many of us here see filling the GE column for our elementary age kids is equivalent to a SS of about 285 or so, which equates to mastery at the 6th-7th grade level.

The reason that a college degree has become the new high school diploma is because the average kid coming out of high school today has had an 8th grade education.

Without trying to minimize your level of experience, I think that at most tends to show a correlation with how the GEs may be arrived at, not that they would actually score at or near the 50th percentile on the test for the grade where they are reported to be around the 50th percentile. And your particular kids might score that way on an 8th or 9th grade test, but I still doubt (without more evidence) that the average score on those tests for children with those GEs would come out that way.

ETA: Okay, that was boneheaded. Rabble rabble small sample size.

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.

The thing we found interesting on the IAS back when it was used for my dd (I think that it was the last version then), was that it didn't specify how out of level the test you were using should be, just asked for out of level test scores and, if I recall correctly, gave points for scores at the 75th percentile or above on the out of level test. We used a test that was four grades above level (the EXPLORE when she was a young 9 y/o 4th grader). She had three parts (science, reading, and english) where she was btwn the 75th - around the 90th percentile at that time, but I recall thinking that, were one inclined to be seeking the most points possible on the IAS, one would just request a one grade out a level test.

I'd tent to agree with Kai, though, that I would be highly disinclined to make placement decisions based on a child's scores on a grade level test alone or an above level test unless the child would still be in the top bunch of the grade into which s/he was accelerated (not necessarily the top student, but one who could be an A student in accelerated classes).

Of course, I don't know that the OP is seeking acceleration, just info on what her dd's ITBS scores mean in terms of whether she should pursue options beyond the standard classroom.