Purposes of the ITBS Batteries, Levels 5-8

The purposes for using standardized achievement batteries with students in the primary grades are much the same as those for testing in later grades. The results can provide unique information about individual students and classes for use in instructional planning. When used as intended, such batteries can be a useful supplement to teacher observations about what students are able to do, and they can provide a starting point for monitoring year-to-year student development.

Levels 5-6 (Grades K-1)

The Level 5 Battery is the first in a series of assessment tools for use in kindergarten through high school. The emphasis of the Level 5 Battery is on academic skills found in the early childhood curriculum. These tests are neither measures of readiness for school nor readiness to read. Rather, they assess the extent to which a child is cognitively prepared to begin work in the academic aspects of the curriculum. The Level 6 Battery is similar in content and purpose to the Level 5 Battery. However, it includes an optional reading test for use with students whose literacy skills have begun to develop. Level 5 is generally used throughout the kindergarten year; Level 6 is used mainly in the fall and midyear of grade 1.

Levels 7-8 (Grades 1-2)

The batteries for Levels 7 and 8 assess a broader array of skills. Social studies, science, and sources of information tests are included, reflecting the expansion of the early elementary curriculum in grades 1 and 2. The structures of the language and mathematics tests also parallel a corresponding change in skill emphasis in these subject areas in grades 1 and 2. The purpose of these batteries is to provide information about student progress in a curriculum that expands in breadth and depth with each additional grade level. Level 7 is generally used in the spring of grade 1 and fall of grade 2; Level 8 is used mainly in the midyear and spring of grade 2.

The development of the basic skills is a continuous process. But the rate of skills development differs widely among children of the same age or grade. Some children learn rapidly. Others, who may be as conscientious and highly motivated, learn more slowly. Most children are more proficient in some skills than in others. Some children progress more rapidly with certain methods, materials, and teaching styles than with others. It is the challenge of identifying and providing the optimal conditions for learning, which vary from child to child, that makes teaching such an exciting profession. Tests that can provide dependable information about each student's most developed and least developed skills will help the teacher to meet this challenge.

Appropriate Purposes for Testing

Some of the specific purposes that the Levels 5-8 batteries were designed to serve are:

1. to help determine the extent to which individual students have the background and skills needed to deal successfully with the academic aspects of an instructional program or a planned instructional sequence;
2. to estimate the general developmental level of students so that materials and instructional procedures may be adapted to meet individual needs;
3. to identify the areas of greatest and least development to use in planning individual instruction for early intervention;
4. to establish a baseline of achievement information so that the monitoring of year-to-year developmental changes may begin;
5. to provide information for making administrative programming decisions that will accommodate developmental differences;
6. to identify areas of relative strength and weakness in the performances of groups (e.g., classes), which may have implications for curriculum change -- either in content or emphasis -- as well as for change in instructional procedures;
7. to provide a basis for reports to parents that will enable home and school to work together in the students' best interests.

Some Inappropriate Purposes for Testing

The popular press and professional literature have furnished countless examples of how test results from the early grades have been used in inappropriate ways. All who use test scores must be made aware of the intended uses of the scores, the limitations of the scores, and the most common misunderstandings about them. Here are some of the most common inappropriate uses of the results from the Levels 5-8 batteries.

1. To screen children for their readiness for school enrollment. The skills measured by these batteries are sensitive to short-term individualized instruction. Consequently, deficiencies in any of them are more likely to be due to limited opportunity to learn or to slow verbal development than to delayed emotional or social development. The results from an achievement battery should never be used alone to make such important placement decisions.
2. To retain students at a grade level. There is considerable disagreement among educators about the appropriateness of grade retention. If a retention decision is to be made, assessment data gathered by the teacher over a period of months is likely to be the most relevant and accurate basis for making such a decision. It should go without saying that test scores from an achievement battery should not be used alone, or even be given major weight, in making a retention decision.
3. To evaluate the effectiveness of an early childhood program. The amount of emphasis given to academic objectives in an early childhood curriculum varies substantially among schools. All programs give attention to students' cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development, but the balance among the curriculum components in any given school ordinarily will depend on the nature of the students' background experiences, the philosophy of the teachers and administrators, and the demands of the community. Since achievement batteries can assess only a limited part of the total curriculum, test scores alone cannot describe the relative success or effectiveness of the entire program. Especially for programs that maintain a nonacademic or play-centered curriculum for the early years, scores on achievement tests provide only partial information about program effectiveness.
4. To decide which instructional objectives should be taught at a certain grade level. The questions on each test of the battery are only a small sample from a very large number of questions that potentially could be asked. For example, the 29 questions on the Level 5 Vocabulary test represent a small fraction of the hundreds of words that could be presented to test the development of students' listening vocabularies. There is nothing so important about each of those 29 words that teachers ought to teach them to their students. In fact, such teaching would destroy our ability to use the test score to generalize about the extent of each student's vocabulary development. In sum, no test question deals with an essential element of knowledge; each question is only representative of a larger collection of important elements.

Teachers sometimes wonder whether it is reasonable to expect young children to respond to the test-taking tasks presented by the Levels 5 and 6 batteries. To help answer this question, the authors have conducted research involving extensive observations of young children and their teachers during ITBS test administrations. The observational evidence demonstrated clearly that, when test administrations are planned and carried out as effectively as most other instructional activities, students can deal with the test-taking tasks well. In one study, virtually all of the 750 students from 47 testing sessions demonstrated the ability to attend, to work independently, and to mark responses properly. (A report of this study is available from Iowa Testing Programs.) In addition, during test development the authors conduct thorough tryouts of potential test items to ensure that primary students are able to deal with the content and processes represented in the final test items. Both the observations and tryout data have indicated that meaningful information about the achievements of young children can be obtained with the Levels 5-8 batteries.