Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Erratic scores: which ones do you go with?

I'd agree with looking for the general trend, and I do for my oldest. A blip here or there is what it is.

Like polarbear said, dd11 has no trend. Especially in reading, we may see scores like: 95th percentile, 55th percentile, 70th, 98th, 50th, 90th... Her NCLB tests do the same. She dropped like a rock on reading and writing from 3rd to 4th. In 3rd, she had a teacher who totally didn't believe in her and she learned little. In 4th, she was in a GT reading class every day with a great teacher who did well by her. The #s seem to have nothing to do with whether she has actually learned anything and, in that case, I was quite sure that her reading and writing capacities weren't worse @ the end of 4th than they had been at the end of 3rd.

I was just unsure if I could reasonable assume that, with MAPS, if she is testing very highly, that she is actually capable of that level of work or knows that much if her scores are bouncing around like crazy. I don't actually think that she's learned a ton in math this year so I don't really see her as having grown 20+ points on that measure. Then again, I think that she knew more than she was showing on the fall math MAPS test.

You may want to see if they will test her alone- that way you can eliminate one of the variables.

Also, I don't know why NWEA says you can't guess your way up because you definitely can. If you can eliminate two answers, work the problem backwards or just use good mathematical logic, you can certainly score higher than you are truly achieving. My son's reading score is at late high school. But some of the questions have to do with logical arguments, types of propaganda and other vocab that I KNOW he doesn't know. I asked him and he just said "Well it was easy! I knew two answer sounded stupid so I eeny-meeny-miney moed the rest!"