What To Do With Mid-Year Test Scores
At this time of the year, a teacher will receive assessment scores from the middle of the year. How can you use this information. If it is Non-standardized check In assessments like what are administered in North Carolina, then there is no perfect means for comparing the beginning of the year to the middle of the year performance. The best you can do is compute a class average for the Middle of the Year (MOY) and BOY. Therefore, if a student scored a little above the average score on the BOY then you could expect the student to score a little above the average score on the MOY test. This holds true for the sub-scores also.
A great idea would be to discuss your student data with your peers who have scores from the same test. You can do this without using student names to protect their identity. If there are no teachers in your school who have students who also took the same test, how about doing a online meeting with a teacher in another school. The collaboration may lead to sharing of instructional strategies and strengthening of your own teaching skills. In these collaborative sessions, dig into the item-level performance of the students. Did you high performing students get an item or two wrong, that tested what you actually taught. As yourself why did my high performing students not get it correct. This is a when you need to do an error analysis (more on that in my next blog).
Some schools are using a standardized assessment like the NWEA MAP or I-READY tests. These tests provide percentile rank scores or other standardized scores which make comparison of students' performance from the BOY test to the MOY test quite easy. If there are percentile rank scores,such as in the I-READY, You can compare these scores, no change in percentile rank indicates the student's relative position in the group stayed the same. This is good! Also, there are overall scores on continuous scale. You would want to see an INCREASE in this score to show that a student is making progress.
remember, it is best practice to use multiple sources of data to gather information about student performance and progress. Sometimes, a test doe NOT reflect the content that was taught and as a result the test scores are not helpful. Short-cycle formative assessment may be the answer to understanding how a student is progressing.
So the question may be: "Why do we administer these expensive or time consuming tests?"