Wednesday, March 5, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
Nevada's fourth-graders rank near the bottom in math skills, according to a national test given to assess academic skills.
Of the 43 states participating in the state-level 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP test, Nevada's fourth-graders ranked 31st in math ability.
If the Department of Defense domestic and overseas dependent elementary schools are counted, Nevada's ranking declines to 33rd place.
State-level administrators expressed surprise at Nevada's performance in the test, which was given in February 1996.
"We should not be willing to accept Nevada's ranking of 31 among 43 states as the best that our children can do," said Mary Peterson, superintendent of public instruction.
"I was surprised. I thought they would do a little better."
Since this is the first year Nevada schools have participated in the voluntary testing, Peterson said the results set a "baseline of data upon which we must improve if we are to adequately prepare our students for the 21st century."
To achieve those improvements, Peterson said the Department of Education is "reviewing (math curriculum) and next fall will form a task force to review fully our standards for math and make sure we have high standards."
Workshops will also be presented to teachers statewide, she said, "to make sure they understand what the standards are and help them with the techniques to teach to those higher standards."
Thomas Klein, an evaluation consultant with the state department and the Nevada coordinator for the NAEP test, also was surprised at Nevada's performance.
"I thought Nevada would score at or above the national average," Klein said, not at four points below the national average.
"We need to encourage our children to do better," he said. "The whole national movement toward setting reachable standards for everyone seems to be appropriate here.
"We should not allow our low-achieving students just to languish. We should challenge them just as we challenge our higher-achieving students," Klein said.
Even though the state department is revising the math curriculum, Klein said there's no magic formula.
"If there was a silver bullet that could cure these ills it would have been discovered by now and everyone would be using it," he said.
While Peterson and Klein were caught off guard with the test scores, Judy Costa, head of Clark County School District's testing and evaluation department, was less alarmed.
"I don't think we should be disappointed at all," Costa said.
Costa said this was the first time Nevada students had taken this test and also pointed out that the NAEP test was a completely different test than what Nevada students are used to.
Peterson and Klein agreed on that point.
Costa explained that unlike the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, which last week reported much more favorable sixth-grade math test scores, the NAEP test required children to show more of their work. The basic skills test is primarily multiple-choice.
Students in schools that scored higher on the NAEP test most likely "had more practice in writing out their justification" for solving math problems than did Nevada students, Costa said.
She also explained that since students had to show their work, the test could not be electronically scored, as is the basic skills test. "It is scored by readers and evaluated holistically," she said.
For instance, even though children may have arrived at the incorrect final answer, they could have been given points for having part of the procedure correct for solving the problem, or vice-versa.
Justification of a problem's answer, Costa said, is the exact problem that Nevada students had on the test.
Klein and Costa also pointed to a cautionary note included in the NAEP report, which stressed that performance differences may be attributed to socioeconomic and "other factors."
The theory is that students of low socioeconomic family status have less opportunity for exposure to successful educational opportunities than do students of wealthier families.
The report also states that parents' education levels and involvement with their child's education may play a significant role in student achievement.
Nevada schools voluntarily participated in the testing, which has been administered since 1990, for the first time last year. Klein isn't sure if the Legislature will again finance state participation in the NAEP. The test is given every two years.
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