Below is a snippet of a conversation that Dottie, Trinity and I were having on another thread:
"Dottie,
Strangely, the scores that worked are the state mandated test scores. I don't much care for the test myself, but I've taken the attitude that if the state mandates them, then they'll have to live with the results. The one good thing about them, though, is that the are on the computer and they self-adapt. So when DS gets a score that says "advanced for 10th" and he's only in 4th, he really has gotten several 10th grade questions (even though the questions themselves may not be well written, etc) -ACS
Acs -
are the tests NWEA's MAP or is there another self adjusting test out there? I think these tests have a lot of potential, and hope that NCLB adopts some kind of "adaptive" testing. Would you be so kind as to start another thread about the standardised testing. I'd like to hear the pro's and the con's." --Trinity
I don't know much about state standardized testing, but I have gathered a few pieces of information about the Idaho test. Up until last spring it was an NWEA test. Those tests, however, were not linked closely enough to the state standards, so they needed to make a change and they ended up changing vendors as well. They are now using a new company
http://isat.caltesting.org/index.html All tests have been computer based and adaptive. So DS does get a number of HS, and even college, questions on his test. I am now beginning to understand that this has been helpful in advocating. Teachers are used to seeing scores on all the kids so they have a frame of reference and see DS's scores for what they are--way above anything they have seen before. I've walked in to meet a teacher for the first time and had them say, "I see your son is reading at the post high school level--I'll try to work with that." I think it also helped clue me in to that fact that we were dealing with a different kind of gifted. When my friends, who had gifted kids, were bragging about their 2nd grader being proficient at 5th and DS was proficient at 10th, it sort of got my attention (and I kept my mouth firmly shut!)
But there are some odd things about the test as well. We had an incident when DS was in 2nd grade, where he would complete the test and then get an error message instead of a result. He retook the test 3 times, each with the same error message. No one in the school or district knew what to do. So *I* tracked down the vendor's number and called tech support. We talked it over adn the tech decided that they probably just had the "elementary test pack" loaded on and that DS was hitting the end of the questions. So they loaded the HS test pack on and DS got a proficient at 10th result. But he had to take the 90 min. test 4 times that spring!
They also run the test differently in the fall and spring. In the fall the test is fully adaptive which gives DS a chance to move quickly up to the HS range and beyond. But in the spring, they take their full grade level test, based on the state standards. Then they are given a limited number of adaptive questions tacked on the end. Because there aren't a lot of those, DS often does not get a chance to max out, since I think the test only goes up by small increments. The result is that his fall score is usually higher than his spring score. And he comes home disappointed because the test was boring.
Usually, though, he loves these tests. They are not timed and the teachers let him take his time. He loves to see if he can figure out the real hard problems that he has never seen before and likes to tell us what Shakespeare reading passage he got, etc.
I don't know if this is helpful, but Trinity told me to post this, so here it is!
Cheers!
ACS
