Purposes of the ITBS Batteries, Levels 9-14

The main purpose of using a standardized achievement battery is to provide information that can be used to improve instruction. The information from the battery is unique in that it is not available from other sources. It is valuable to the extent that it contributes to better instructional decisions than educators could make without having that information available. Though standardized achievement scores cannot and should not replace teacher observations and classroom assessment information, they can provide unique supplementary information that bears on decisions about selecting learning objectives and procedures, designing or choosing instructional materials, and creating an effective learning environment.

The development of academic skills is a continuous process. But the rate of skills development differs widely among children of the same age or grade. Some students 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 students 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 helps make 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 9-14 batteries were designed to serve are:

1. to help teachers determine the extent to which individual students in their classes have the knowledge and skills needed to deal successfully with the academic aspects of the instructional program the teachers have planned;
2. to estimate the general developmental level of students so that teachers may adapt materials and instructional procedures to meet individual needs;
3. to identify each student's areas of greatest and least development for use in planning individual instructional goals and approaches;
4. to provide achievement information that makes it possible to monitor year-to-year developmental changes;
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 standardized test results have been used in inappropriate ways. Many of the common misuses stem from depending on a single test score to make an important decision about a student or class of students. All who wish to interpret 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 inappropriate uses of the results from the ITBS batteries.

1. To select students for special instructional programs. Test scores can contribute important information to decisions about who needs remediation and who might best be included in programs for gifted and talented students. But teacher observations and student performance on daily classroom work also provide extensive achievement information from numerous occasions and on a variety of academic tasks. Scores from other assessments may also be relevant to such decision-making. Ordinarily, pooling all of these forms of information will result in a better decision than using only one piece of information, such as a test score.
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, classroom assessment data gathered by the teacher over a period of months is likely to be a highly relevant and accurate basis for making such a decision. A test score from an achievement battery should not be used alone in making such a significant decision. However, a test score can make a valuable contribution to the array of evidence that should be considered.
3. To evaluate the effectiveness of the entire school program. A school's curriculum is made up of many subject-matter components. Achievement in some of them can be measured by standardized achievement batteries, but in others, achievement may never be assessed on a building or district-wide basis. For example, speaking skills, computer literacy, music and art knowledge and ability, second-language learning, and lab skills are not measured by achievement batteries but are regarded by most educators as important components of the academic curriculum. No assessment method or instrument can supply the full range of information required to evaluate the entire school program, or even the complete academic curriculum. Since batteries like the ITBS can assess achievement in only a limited part of the total curriculum, scores from them must be supplemented by results from other forms of assessment if the relative success of the entire program is to be judged. Standardized test scores alone should not be used for this purpose because achievement batteries are not designed to cover the full range of objectives that make up the typical school curriculum.
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 9 Vocabulary test represent a small fraction of the hundreds of words that could be presented to test the development of students' vocabularies. There is nothing so important about each of those 29 words that teachers ought to teach each one to their students. In fact, such teaching would destroy our ability to use the Vocabulary 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.