What’s the deal with standardized testing?
Standardized testing—what is it, and what is it for? Standardized testing is a method of assessment where all students answer the same questions and are graded according to the same standards, providing an objective comparison point across students from diverse educational backgrounds. Since the purpose of standardized testing is to provide a standard measure among the diversity of educational methods, it’s a wonderful tool for homeschoolers! We educate outside of the standardized public school system, so our curricular paths are varied, and it can be difficult to find an appropriate assessment of our students that accounts for that variation.
That’s where standardized testing comes into play. These tests are designed to provide an external measure—a national norm—against which all students are compared in the same way.
The most clear example of this is college entrance exams. The ACT, SAT, and CLT are college entrance exams that assess a high school student’s learning so that colleges and universities can know the students’ academic abilities before they step on campus. GPAs, while helpful, are inconsistent because it’s up to each school and teacher to determine how grades are administered. Standardized entrance exams give colleges and universities a standard measure of a student’s ability among a diverse range of educational methods and rigor.
Why test?
Most parents I’ve talked to can completely understand the utility of standardized testing for college entrance. It makes sense that the colleges want a way to assess incoming students’ academic abilities independent of the inconsistencies in reported GPAs.
But why would parents want to test their children any other time, especially since it’s not required in Indiana?
How to use standardized assessments for good
Assessments are a way to see strengths and weaknesses. Parents understand the full picture of the student; assessments give an insight into the details. You may know already that your child is struggling in reading; you don’t need an assessment to tell you that. But what the assessment, if it is sufficiently in-depth, can reveal is what part of reading is causing the child to struggle. Is it comprehension; is it vocabulary; is it understanding analogies?
This is where the analytics of standardized exams come in. In the following section, I will be using student analytics from a CLT5 to demonstrate how to use an assessment to better understand and support your student’s education.
Note: A CLT5 is Classic Learning Test’s 5th-grade exam. Classic Learning Test (CLT) provides a suite of assessments for grades 3-12 designed with homeschoolers in mind. These at-home, online, and parent-proctored exams all use classic content not aligned with Common Core. The stand-out strength of these assessments is their student analytics included in each score report. The images below are from a sample CLT5 score report for 5th graders. Some of the other grade level reports differ in formatting, but all report the same or analogous data.
How to read analytics
The first thing you’ll see on your CLT score report is the section and composite scores. These are pretty intuitive: the score your student received on the exam. These scores are helpful to compare between CLT test takers, or to compare one student’s scores over consecutive years.
The Composite, Lexile, and Quantile percentiles are the real gold of this section.
The Composite Percentile, also known as an NPR (national percentile ranking), shows where your student is in comparison to the national average. This is what makes the exam nationally normed: your student is compared to a national average. A percentile of 50 means she is sitting exactly at average. A percentile above 50 is better than average, and below 50 is below average. This student is at a 64th percentile rank, meaning she is performing better than 64% of 5th graders and is in the top 36% of 5th graders nationally.
The Lexile and Quantile Percentiles show the same kind of data, just based on one section instead of composite (overall) scores—the Lexile Percentile for the Verbal Reasoning sections, and the Quantile Percentile for the Quantitative Reasoning sections.
The Lexile and Quantile Measures give an objective score that can be compared across grades. With these measures, you can compare your 5th grader sitting at a 810Q with the average 5th grade measure of 715Q and then see that she’s actually performing closer to the 6th-grade level (the 6th-grade 50th percentile is 820Q). The grade level charts that I’m referencing here are all available on hub.lexile.com, along with lots of other amazing tools to use your Lexile and Quantile measures. You can even find book lists curated for your student’s reading level according to their Lexile measure!
Once you have the broad overview of the composite and section scores, the analytics have reports on content versus reasoning skills, so you can get an insight into your student’s learning style, and on fundamental versus secondary skills, to show how much she’s mastered the current grade’s skills, and how many skills she has already acquired for the next grade.
The real meat of the analytics are the domain and subdomain reports. This is where you can find strengths and areas for improvement.
The Improvement Domains show gaps in the student’s learning. These are areas that you might want to review before advancing, and these areas for improvement can sometimes be a sign that you need to change or supplement your curriculum with something to fill those gaps.
We often focus on what needs improvement, but the Top Domains are important, too, as they can show you where strengths lie. This sample student is very strong in Geometrical Reasoning and in Writing Concepts and Skills but not as strong in Reading Comprehension. This can be a sign that he has a knack for spatial reasoning more than for abstract concepts.
After the Improvement and Top Domains, the analytics list all the domains and subdomains on the exam so you can see exactly what concepts were covered on the exam.
Each domain section is expandable to show its respective subdomains and the percentage of questions answered correctly. In CLT analytics, you can select the subdomain names, and it opens a pdf that explains the subdomain, describes what concepts it assesses, and provides sample questions. You can use these pdfs as a supplemental resource for your student’s education, for example using the sample questions in a post-test practice session.
Remember the goal
Whenever you test your child, remember the purpose of assessments. Assessments serve as a tool for the educator to better understand her student’s education. As a tool, assessments are subservient to the craftsman. So craft your education as you see fit, using the tools at your disposal to make it the very best for your child!