Testing system said to be more precise

By Emily Richmond

Tuesday, April 30, 2002 | 10:58 a.m.

As debate heats up nationwide over the value of standardized testing for improving education, Clark County School District officials say they are switching to a new system that will more accurately track students as they progress from grade to grade.

Clark County School District students performed near or above the national average on the Terra Nova basic skills test, although mathematics scores for 10th graders dropped six points from the previous year, according to a report released Monday by district officials.

School district officials blamed the dip in 10th grade scores on a new state regulation that added some failed students kept back from the 11th grade to the testing pool.

The Terra Nova Basic Skills test has been administered each October to Clark County students in grades four, eight and 10. The results are compared against the national average for the tests, which is set at the 50th percentile. Beginning in the fall, the school district will switch to the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills for grades three through eight, and the Iowa Tests of Educational Development for grades nine and 10.

Rather than testing successive classes of fourth, eighth and 10th graders, the Iowa tests will track actual groups of children, said Judy Costa, director of testing, evaluation and accountability for the Clark County School District.

"We'll be able to establish new baselines for achievement and growth that will more accurately reflect our classrooms," Costa said.

Communities across the country are frustrated with the state of education and are demanding tangible results, said Kathy Christie, vice president for the Education Commission of the States Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research firm.

"Testing alone doesn't help a child learn," Christie said. "It's just one way of measuring instructional methods and how well the message is getting across."

Mary Ella Holloway, president of the Nevada Education Association which represents 12,000 of the district's teachers, called the switch to the Iowa test a "step in the right direction."

"It obviously makes more sense to compare a fourth-grade class's performance to their test results from the year before when they were third graders," Holloway said. "Comparing a fourth-grade class to the fourth-grade class that came before it doesn't tell you anything about what the children are actually learning."

While testing is a necessary element, too much time is spent preparing students for, and administering, standardized tests, Holloway said. Too many outside factors influence student performance for the tests to be considered overly valuable, Holloway said.

"Some kids come to school and haven't had breakfast, or are upset because their parents have had a fight, or maybe they just don't care how they do on the test," Holloway said. "It doesn't seem fair to base it all on one exam."

The 2001 Terra Nova scores, released Monday by the district, showed the steepest dips were by Clark County's 10th graders. The scores dropped from the 56th percentile in October 2000 to the 50th percentile last fall. The 10th-grader scores also dropped in reading, from the 52nd to the 49th percentile. The language scores dropped two points from the 55 percentile to the 53rd percentile, and four points in science, from the 53rd to 49th percentile.

The test results for 10th graders were skewed by the implementation of a new state regulation aimed at curtailing social promotion, Costa said. As of the 2000-2001 school year, students who failed to earn at least five credits in the ninth grade were promoted to the 10th grade. That meant only the most successful students actually took the exam in the fall of 2000 and the held-back classmates were excluded.

As a result of having only the more successful students tested, the 2000 Terra Nova results showed jumps across the board from the 1999 exam, Costa said.

The following year, the new state regulation was extended to the next grade level, and 10th graders without enough credits for 11th grade were held back. The October 2001 10th graders tested included the held-back students who otherwise would have moved on to 11th grade, as well as a pool of students who had been kept back in ninth grade, Costa said.

The addition of the held-back students to the testing pool skewed the scores, Costa said.

The district's fourth graders saw a gain in science scores, from the 44th to the 46th percentile. Reading scores at the fourth-grade level rose one point, from the 49th percentile to the 50th, while the math score stayed the same at the 61st percentile. The language scores dropped two points, from the 57th percentile to the 55th.

Scores for eighth graders in Clark County were unchanged from the 2000 test, with scores in the 50th percentile for reading, the 45th percentile for science and the 52nd percentile for both math and language.