Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment What steps to take.....

I hereby nominate Cathy for the prestigious title of: Board Guru- IAS.

There is a lot more information in the book...if you plan to use the IAS for advocacy you'll need to get a copy.

Rats. Anybody want to type them out

You could still do a quick and dirty estimate. The missing pages would contribute 0-33 points.

IAS Grand Total (out 80 possible):

60-80 Excellent candidate, acceleration recommended.
46-59 Good candidate, acceleration recommended.
35-45 Marginal candidate, no clear recommendation.
<34 Whole-grade acceleration not recommended, consider subject acceleration, etc.

I also noticed that on NWEA's site they have the 2005 RIT and Placement Guidelines but they only have the 2008 RIT values - no placement guidelines yet. At least that I could find. Does anyone have a link to the 2008 Placement Guidelines?

.....continues to gather data

There's a good question ... in ds6's MAP assessment last year he scored at beginning third-grade level ... which was 99th percentile. I have to think there are more kids out there working above where he was at that time? Maybe I've got my GT blinders on, but really, I wonder if there was some sort of ceiling on it. He did the Primary Measures one (K-2). OTOH, the story of the second grader hitting algebra seems to suggest there really isn't a ceiling and the test will go as high as you need it to.

I wonder if the grade levels are more "starting places" so that the child starts at a reasonable spot?

ETA: We tried the IAS rigamarole last year. Didn't work, but from what I understood at the time, you can norm the MAP against current grade for an achievement test, or against a higher grade for an aptitude test -- but you can't use it for both. Could be wrong there, we just needed an aptitude test (and the school wouldn't take the MAP for it, ha).

Either way, if you do end up using the IAS in full, make sure the school follows the steps outlined. My ds's public school broke all the meeting rules and filled the thing out themselves -- so it said what they wanted it to say, with no parental input. Frustrating.

Whoooa!
Hold on just a minute!!! There was suppose to be parental input? You mean the school was supposed to do something other than fill out the IAS themselves??? We were never made a part of the process of filling out the IAS. At the acceleration meeting, after the school had already made their recommendation, they mentioned that DS's score on the IAS was a 1.5? I'm now interpreting that to mean half way between an excellent and a good candidate, but they never gave us a total score or showed us the breakdown of points. And when we went back six months later for another acceleration meeting, I politely asked the school what his out-of-level testing scores were like. They looked at me blankly and said, "Out of level testing?"
<grumble, grumble, grumble>

Okay, I'll just let it go. It is water under the bridge now!
(but it still makes me question how thorough DS's school was then, and how carefully I have to question them in the future.)

Yea, Dottie!!

Is there anyway to look up what the Iowa Basic Skills test numbers mean? The report that I got from DS's school gave percentiles for the scores, but did not give grade equivalents. I've always wondered, since he took the test in 1st grade, what his score meant and if the school should have realized that we would be facing a grade acceleration in his future. Is anyone here fluent in IBSt data?

Again, it is water under the bridge. But I don't currently have any other test scores to obsess about, so I might as well go back and revisit some older ones!

That's what doesn't make very much sense to me. Here... I will paste in a very quotes from their web site.



http://www.education.uiowa.edu/itp/itbs/itbs_interp_score.htm

So they seem to indicate that a child could earn above grade level scores on the IBSt, and they scale the scores in a continuum. So for instance, DS(then 6) scored a 200 in vocabulary at the very beginning of 1st grade. Does that mean that he had a score of an average 4th grader?

Dottie: You are probably correct about this. The copyright information on the bottom says, "1996, 1993 The Riverside Publishing Company". So it is an old copy of the test.

Our school normally gives the IBSt to the third graders. For the longest time I was not even sure if they gave him the 3rd grade test that they had handy, or an old 1st grade version that they happen to have laying around. I think it is the later though, since they did not give him the social studies and sciences subtests.<drats!> But I wonder if those SS scores have a scale that continually increases as the grade level material advances? Does a 1st grader's score of 200 have any relevance or comparison to a 4th grader's SS=200 score?

So I guess what I was asking is, "Does anyone know the the SS values associated with typical performance in each grade?"