Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment help with woodcock johnson reading scores

hi all
i used to post a lot about my daughter who is gifted but now (under a new name i think mine was deactivated) I have a question about my son, who is a special education student. I just received a copy of his Individualized Education Plan and in it there were some test scores that i think may be inaccurately reported and interpreted... This is how they were reported:

Woodcock reading Mastery Test- Revised
passage comprehension 7.4 (percentile)
Word Attack 6.9 (Percentile)
Word Indentification 6.9 (Percentile)

After seeing these scores in PRINT i just don't think they make any sense. Reading is a strong subject for him, but these scores are being used to justify pulling him out of class more often (which we strongly oppose).. At our meeting we did not see a score report and the scores were read as 7th percentile and 6th percentile. He was a fourth grader at the time (March of his fourth grade year) and his age was 9 years 11 months. I feel these must be grade level equivlents... In prior years he always got in the 90s as far as percentile scores.... Can anyone tell me what the percentile scores would be if these are indeed Grade level scores and not percentiles?? can a percentile be reported like this (with a decimal point??)... Thanks in advance

irene

I'm sure someone with more expertise than me will answer, but as far as I remember, WJ rounds all percentile scores to whole numbers. Those look more like age or grade scores.

Percentiles can be reported as decimal points, but I really, really doubt that you'd get a decimal like 7.4. I've never seen a decimal like that on the WJ or any other achievement test for that matter. The decimals usually only show up when you are above the 99th percentile and then you get 99.9, etc. They pretty much always end with a .9, not .4 or anything like that.

For the WJ reading master test, you should be able to get GE (grade equivalent), AE (age equivalent), percentile, NCE (norm curve equivalent), and standard scores. I, unfortunately, don't know how to convert btwn GE and percentiles for a 4th grader (or any grade, honestly!), but I strongly suspect that the numbers you were given, if they were GEs, would be a lot closer to that 90th percentile mark you've seen before for your ds.

I'd ask for a more complete print out from the testing b/c it sounds like someone made a mistake.

hi all
thank you for your help. We just got a call from the school that these are indeed grade equivalents, not percentiles, and its a mistake, but waiting for full report. They said they "think" they are around 50th percentile but i know just by common sense that a mid-year fourth grader with a 50th percentile score would be somewhere around a 4.5 GE not a 7.4 GE. Does that make sense?

They also mentioned that the same mistake happened with the math scores (Stanford math test), which I didn't pick up because they were reported as a round number of 6.. I thought it was 6th percentile, but again 6th GRADE!! big difference for a fourth grader. wow you really have to be on top of things. bad news for people who don't follow these boards and just wouldn't think twice about a decimal on a percentile score.

Irene

It's most likely a typo - if your ds is in 4th grade and usually scores in the 90th percentile on reading skills I'm *guessing* his grade equivalents would be around 6-7th grade - but that's only a *guess* (loosely based on having 3 kids who've taken the WJ-III tests several different times).

I'd follow up with an email noting the inconsistency in testing, and also ask for a full report of all the subtest info. There is a standard WJ-III report ((I think it's standard - we've had the same report from different evaluators) that is computer-generated and should be a part or your child's record. It lists subtest, raw score, scaled score, grade equivalent, age equivalent, percentile... along with other info (ranges etc) for each subtest.

It sounds like what you have is the draft IEP report. FWIW, in our school district the IEP reports are all generated from a form on the computer, and whoever is writing it up simply answers questions / types in data. On the WJ-III testing report, there's an option to report as GE (grade equivalent) or percentile (the default here is percentile but we've been asked if we'd rather have GE since some parents/teachers find it more useful). I can totally see a sped person here entering a student's report as GE but forgetting to flip the units "switch" on the report to GE from percentile - so I'm guessing there's a good chance that's happened for your ds too.

Even if that's all it is though, it might be really useful to you to see the full report with the different categories just to have the information.

polarbear