Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment EXPLORE results in...

We got our Feb scores too. We did it last year also - most of the scores were similar, but Science dropped from 98 to 90th percentile. Obviously still a great score - I'm just wondering if I should read anything into it, or think oh, just a bad testing day......

Interesting...ds's scores all improved from last year except science which dropped a couple points. Of course, when I was pondering why he did admit to being bored and ancy by the time he got to the science section and so he didn't soncentrate/try as hard.

I too am puzzling over scores. While the composite remained the same, two scores decreased and one increased, off-setting the decrease. DS said he felt this test was harder than last year. We are HSing so I'm not sure what to make of this if anything....

Comparing the NUMATS summary for 2010 to the one for 2011, I think the test may have been a little harder this year.

Is the summary out already for 2011? I'd love to see that if you were able to point me somewhere!

:-)

If you have done NUMATS before, did you find their Planning and Resource Guide helpful?

Where is the summary for 2011?

The director of our talent search said that historically the numbers stay very even from year to year. So one would not expect large shifts. I wouldn't worry about changes in %, especially if you started high. Say a kid gets 22 of 25 right in science (I'm just making this up) in 3rd grade. The next year, there isn't a lot of space to improve, but other kids will start to catch up, so your % will likely shift some. I am not facile with statistics, so not sure if this is accurate, but it makes sense to me.

I'm not sure that most of us are talking about shifts in percentiles. My dd, for instance, dropped a number of raw points on science and went up the same # of points on math from the year prior. That is her actually answering fewer questions correctly on one part than the year prior in that one area. For example, and these aren't her actual scores, but it would be like a child getting a 19 on reading one year and then a 15 the next.

In her case, she may have been fuzzy headed since she had a fever I didn't realize until I picked her up, though. She is also an erratic little person, so who knows.

I know I'm referring to raw points, not percentiles. All of ds's scores improved 3-4 raw points except science went down 2 points. Ds says he wasn't trying as hard by the end of the test, but maybe this section was also more difficult from last year--who knows.