Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Norming on WJ-III, not just age

http://tinyurl.com/23ah8u2

This will not allow me to cut and paste, and my question concerns table 4 on page 7 of the Assessment Bulletin regarding technical issues.

The bulletin is a comparison between WJIII and Weschlers. I was surprised and confused by the norming plan in the WJIII. It says that the following variables are considered: race, sex, hispanic origin, type of schooling, parent's education, etc.

I don't understand what they mean, but it looks like they norm each student's score according to those variables. For example, assuming for the sake of argument that children from highly educated parents get higher scores, that advantage would be removed by norming children of highly educated parents together.

Am I understanding this correctly? I found this article and I am even more baffled. Can one of you brilliant people translate down to someone like me who is not that smart? I'm not putting myself down, I'm just trying to communicate that I can't figure out what the heck this means. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11272618

I really appreciate your help.

I think this is just about what measures the developers of each test took to make sure that their sample they used for developing the norms was representative of the population the test was to be used on. That seems to be what a "norming plan" is. Here's a paragraph from a PhD thesis I googled up that seems to make the terminology clearer (PhD theses are often good reading as background because the candidates have to include a lot of information that people writing papers for publication will just assume all readers know!)
http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2700/m1/1/