Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment California Achievement Test

Yeah, I have been learning that the hard way, he started a beginning algebra course with EPGY and it has been going very slowly. He can do it, but its taking him 20 mins to do 5-8 questions, mostly because he still has to skip count to multiply. I've never been one to do drill with my kids and now I see where this might be an issue. I know his math ability is way beyond everything else, I'd just love to know where everything else is, so that I can bring in a tutor to help me out a little (homeschooling 3 kids).

The info on the SAT10 and ITBS here is interesting to me b/c I am going to be helping a good friend of mine with testing her dd on one of these two soon. You need at least a BA and some testing coursework to administer the SAT10 and at least a BA to administer the ITBS. Df has neither, so I am the one! Her kiddo is homeschooled.

In her instance, I believe that getting relatively higher scores is desired b/c she needs them to submit to the district to prove that her dd is making adequate progress. I don't think that she wants artificially inflated scores, but whichever of these two might give higher results might be desirable for her purposes. The concern we have with the ITBS is that it is more tightly timed and her dd has some anxiety with timed tests. Any thoughts on those two tests beyond what has been posted already?

How old is the child you'll be testing?

DS8 took the 1st grade and 2nd grade ITBS. These were not above-level testing. Speed is not his strength, but he finished the timed portions both years with no trouble.

The biggest complaints I had were that some of the questions were not well-written (so that more than one answer seemed possible, even to adults) and that some questions assumed a knowledge of things that a child might not have if not in a very particular school setting. I don't want to give details of the test, obviously, so please excuse me for speaking in such a cryptic way.

But even these problems weren't a big deal. It was a few questions. The timed portions were definitely not a problem.

HTH...

My kids have found that they can easily run out of time on the ITBS.

The school our kids attended until their 8th/6th grades switched to the ITBS from the TerraNova during their last year there. My daughter did not finish several of the language sections which yielded a very low for her score of 69th percentile. For comparison, her Explore English score, taken the same year, was at the 98th percentile.

My ds has earned a math composite of 99th percentile all three years he has taken the ITBS despite his not finishing several problems on the computation subsection this year.

Their previous TerraNova scores are quite comparable to their results on their ITBS achievement test. This is true of the school average too which generally falls around the 75th percentile overall.

She is almost 11 and a 5th grader.

My dds took the ITBS in 1st and 3rd grade at a charter they were attending that time. My oldest, who is also not a fast person (42nd percentile on the WISC as compared to 90s on all of the other indices), did poorly in the fall and really well in the spring. The difference was anxiety.

In the fall, her teacher stressed how important it was which left her so stressed that she came home at the end of the day physically shaking. She didn't finish so much of it that the report said that it couldn't give a core or composite score. In the spring, we convinced her that it didn't matter at all and she scored in the 99th percentile on the totals for reading, language, science, social studies, sources of info, core, and composite. She was in the 92nd for math.

This seemed like an accurate representation of her achievement at that time so my take was that it could be completed in the time gived even by a child whose strength is not speed unless there was a lot of stress or pressure involved. I'm sure that I won't stress my df's child, but I would rather go with the SAT10 if it is likely to work better for her in terms of time constraints, etc.

I don't have any experience with the SAT10, but my DS8 has a similar reaction to speed requirements. He gets so panicky that his brain pretty much shuts down. It's almost phobic. He had time to spare on the timed math section of the ITBS, so it wasn't a problem at all.

However, the time might become a bigger factor as they get older. I can't speak to that either since we only did early elementary level testing so far.