Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Could someone tell me more about ITBS?

Could someone tell me a little more about the ITBS? How do we use the scores? My DD took above grade ITBS this past month. We are hoping to approach the school for more accomodations with her ELA. I know she only missed one question on the ELA section of her MEAP testing but nothing was said about that in regards to her classroom situation, that's where the ITBS came in. We don't normally use it much in our state that I know of but the psychologist recommended it to get some more ideas for the school.

How many grades above level was the ITBS she took?

I'm not sure I understand the question, Melissa. Forgive my denseness!

Are you asking how to present the scores to the school? Or more basically, are you asking how to read and interpret the scores?

I know absoulutely nothing about ITBS. The scores are expected in this week and I have no idea what they will actually do for us. I believe she only took one level up because we were told more testing may be necessary depending on her results. It seems weird to me. Does that make sense?

I think so.

I'm no expert, but DS8 has taken the ITBS. So here's my best effort.

I can tell you that ITBS stands for the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. It is an achievement test, so if your child scores well on it one level above grade level, it will probably indicate to the school that some sort of acceleration or differentiation is in order.

If your child is HG+, ceiling issues may mean that you don't know much more than you would have with an at-level test. It really does test more or less for just a single grade level's worth of material, so there's not a lot of space in there to see what a child can do.

Also, (because a lot of people forget/don't know this), a child can get all the answers right and will still not be in the 100th percentile. That would mean that the child did better than everyone (even herself!) and that's not possible.

Also, if a section of the test is fairly easy, the highest percentile possible might be lower than 99th. If 3% of the kids who normed the test got all of them right, than anyone getting a perfect score is in the 97th percentile. Miss one and the percentile might drop back quite a lot, especially if there aren't many questions on that section. I think that is often misunderstood, and especially if the school doesn't use this kind of test normally, you want to be sure that they know not to just look at the percentiles without the context of the number she got right and wrong. Both matter.

For example, I'm thinking of a situation where the school wants a 90th percentile to advance a grade, but a perfect score in one section is only the 89th percentile. You don't want them to refuse services over that--she can't do better than perfect, you know?

I hope I got that right! HTH!

I think you did Kriston. MY son took the 3rd grade ITBS along w/ his HSing buddy. We compared test scores. On some sections (the language arts) you miss one, you're at 99th%, you miss two, you're at 93rd% (not exact numbers but it was dropping about 4-6% points per question wrong). But in the more critical thinking sections (the ones that can be used for JHU-CTY for instance) such as science, you miss one 99th%, you miss two 98th% - so those sections allowed you to get more wrong and still have a percentile ranking.

I thought it odd that the average percentile ranking was 41-89%. Above avg was 90-99%.

Ok I just checked. Miss 1 on science and it was 99th but miss 1 on vocabulary and it's 96th% and miss 2 on social studies and it's 96th%.

So, she is nine, would be going into fourth, is going into fifth and I believe they tested with Level 11, I think that is fifth, it would have been better to test with sixth? The only concern I would have is that they requested full testing and she hasn't been exposed to ancient history or world history. How would that impact her scores? She felt the test was "very easy" so it will be interesting to see her results.

I don't have the IOWA scale for acceleration. Didn't think I'd need it since she homeschools most of her subjects. I'm not sure if this has something to do with a different offer for next year or what exactly. We don't discuss this coming year with the school until the middle of August. She only attended for ELA this last year.

I can tell you from having administered the ITBS twice that some tests--like social studies and science--are much more content-specific, so I would expect scores to be lower there. For example, if a child studied earth science instead of biology as the test expected, the child's science score would probably be lower (depending upon what the child learned through osmosis and the Science Channel, of course...), even though there's a lot of material the child *does* know that wasn't covered on the test. It's just a matter of never having seen the material.

Homeschoolers usually have somewhat lower scores on these content-y subjects than they do on the math and language arts sections (among others). Unless the child has been at least somewhat "taught to the test," it's kind of inevitable.

Obviously if there are too many of these gaps, it can become a problem. But all kids have gaps. All of them. Even the ones who didn't skip any grades and who sat in class every day. That's why spiral curricula are the norm. It's not a big deal unless it's extreme.

I would argue that unless the school's curriculm follows the ITBS exactly--and I can't imgine that it would if they don't use the ITBS for their normal testing--then lower (but not low) science and hisory scores are probably irrelevant.

I'm tired and not explaining this well, but what I'm saying is that if the material in the ITBS isn't what the school covers, then those test scores are less relevant to whether she can succeed at a higher grade. Does that make sense?

I think you gave her the right test based upon what you say you're using it for. If you wanted to distinguish ceilings, you'd have to get out of that 90+ range and have her get some low scores in some things. Then you'd need a test designed for older kids.

But it sounds like what you really want/expect to see is a cluster of high scores at the top (still) so as to persuade the school that she needs a more appropriate school fit. That means that one year up was probably your best choice.

My advice: don't let them keep her from advancing (assuming you think that's what she needs and she wants to do it) because of her history score. I'd recommend offering to catch her up at home if necessary, but I wouldn't let that slow her down if she's ready to move up.

P.S. to Dottie: Interesting about the Explore! I wonder if they're trying to combat this very issue.

Is there any way to find out a general breakdown of how %C (percent correct) scores map to national percentiles?

For the younger grades, like grade 1, I would expect that the 50% percentile for a test like this might actually fall well below answering 50% of the problems correct. Little kids are still learning how to follow instructions, stay on the correct question, fill in the bubble properly, etc., not to mention all the first-graders who come to public schools speaking predominantly a non-English language at home. I wouldn't be surprised if the 50% percentile actually scored about 35% correct on ITBS, but I have no way of knowing. Is there any way to know the historical mapping?

oops - pardon the redundancy. I obviously didn't need to type the "%" sign and the word "percentile" together. That's what I get for not proofreading. :-)