Usually two types of tests are used in schools, criterion-referenced and norm-referenced. Criterion-referenced tests are used to measure student mastery of instructional objectives or curriculum rather than to compare one student’s performance with another or to rank students. They are often used as benchmarks to identify areas of strengths and/or weaknesses in a given curriculum. Norm-referenced tests compare an individual’s performance to that of his/her classmates, thus emphasizing relative rather an absolute performance. Scores on norm-referenced tests indicate the students’ ranking relative position to that group. Typical scores used with norm-referenced tests include raw scores, grade norms, percentiles, stanines, and standard scores.
1. Raw scores
The raw score is simply the number of points received on a test when the test has been scored according to the directions. For example, if a student responds to 65 items correctly on an objective test in which each correct item counts one point, the raw score will be 65.
Although a raw score is a numerical summary of student’s test performance, it is not very meaningful without further information. For example, in the above example, what does a raw score of 35 mean? How many items were in the test? What kinds of the problems were asked? How the items were difficult?
2. Grade norms
Grade norms are widely used with standardized achievement tests, especially at elementary level. The grade equivalent that corresponds to a particular raw score identifies the grade level at which the typical student obtains that raw score. Grade equivalents are based on the performance of students in the norm group in each of two or more grades.
3. Percentile ranking
A percentile is a score that indicates the rank of the score compared to others (same grade/age) using a hypothetical group of 100 students. In other words, a percentile rank (or percentile score) indicates a student’s relative position in the group in terms of percentage of students.
Percentile rank is interpreted as the percentage of individuals receiving scores equal or lower than a given score. A percentile of 25 indicates that the student’s test performance is equal or exceeds 25 out of 100 students on the same measure.
4. Standard scores
A standard score is also derived from the raw scores using the normal information gathered when the test was developed. Instead of indicating a student’s rank compared to others, standard scores indicate how far above or below the average (Mean) an individual score falls, using a common scale, such as one with an average of 100. Basically standard scores express test performance in terms of standard deviation (SD) from the Mean. Standard scores can be used to compare individuals of different grades or age groups because all are converted into the same numerical scale. There are various forms of standard scores such as z-score, T-score, and stanines.
Z-score expresses test performance simply and directly as the number of SD units a raw score is above or below the Mean. A z-score is always negative when the raw score is smaller than Mean. Symbolic representation can be shown as: z-score = X-M/SD.
T-score refers to any set of normally distributed standard cores that has a Mean of 50 and SD of 10. Symbolically it can be represented as: T-score = 50+10(z).
Stanines are the simplest form of normalized standard scores that illustrate the process of normalization. Stanines are single digit scores ranging from 1 to 9. These are groups of percentile ranks with the entire group of scores divided into nine parts, with the largest number of individuals falling in the middle stanines, and fewer students falling at the extremes (Linn & Gronlund, 2000).
5. Norm reference test and traditional letter-grade system
It is the most easiest and popular way of grading and reporting system. The traditional system is generally based on grades A to F. This rating is generally reflected as: Grade A
(Excellent), B (Very Good), C (Good), D (Satisfactory/Average), E (Unsatisfactory/ Below Average), and F (Fail).
This system does truly assess a student’s progress in different learning domains. First shortcoming is that using this system it is difficult to interpret the results. Second, a student’s performance is linked with achievement, effort, work habits, and good behaviour; traditional letter-grade system is unable to assess all these domains of a student. Third, the proportion of students assigned each letter grade generally varies from teacher to teacher. Fourth, it does not indicate patterns of strengths and weaknesses in the students (Linn & Gronlund, 2000). Inspite of these shortcomings, this system is popular in schools, colleges and universities.
6. Criterion reference test and the system of pass-fail
It is a popular way of reporting students’ progress, particularly at elementary level. In the context of Pakistan, as majority of the parents are illiterate or hardly literate, therefore they have concern with ‘pass or fail’ about their children’s performance in schools. This system is mostly used for courses taught under a pure mastery learning approach i.e. criterion-referenced testing.
This system has also many shortcomings. First, as students are declared just pass or fail (successful or unsuccessful) so many students do not work hard and hence their actual learning remains unsatisfactory or below desired level. Second, this two-category system provides less information to the teacher, student and parents than the traditional letter-grade (A, B, C, D) system. Third, it provides no indication of the level of learning.
7. Checklist of Objectives
To provide more informative progress reports, some schools have replaced or supplemented the traditional grading system with a list of objectives to be checked or rated. This system is more popular at elementary school level. The major advantage of this system is that it provides a detailed analysis of the students’ strengths and weaknesses. For example, the objectives for assessing reading comprehension can have the following objectives.
Reads with understanding
Works out meaning and use of new words
Reads well to others
Reads independently for pleasure (Linn & Gronlund, 2000).
8. Rating scales
In many schools students’ progress is prepared on some rating scale, usually 1 to 10, instead letter grades; 1 indicates the poorest performance while 10 indicates as the excellent or extra-ordinary performance. But in the true sense, each rating level corresponds to a specific level of learning achievement. Such rating scales are also used by the evaluation of students for admissions into different programmes at university level. Some other rating scales can also be seen across the world.
In rating scales, we generally assess students’ abilities in the context of ‘how much’, ‘how often’, ‘how good’ etc. (Anderson, 2003). The continuum may be qualitative such as ‘how good a student behaves’ or it may quantitative such as ‘how much marks a student got in a test’. Developing rating scales has become a common practice now-a-days, but still many teachers don’t possess the skill of developing an appropriate rating scale in context to their particular learning situations.
9. Letters to parents/guardians
Some schools keep parents inform about the progress of their children by writing letters. Writing letters to parents is usually done by a fewer teachers who have more concern with their students as it is a time consuming activity. But at the same time some good teachers avoid to write formal letters as they think that many aspects are not clearly interpreted. And some of the parents also don’t feel comfortable to accept such letters.
Linn and Gronlund (2000) state that although letters to parents might provide a good supplement to other types of reports, their usefulness as the sole method of reporting progress is limited by several of the following factors.
Comprehensive and thoughtful written reports require excessive amount of time and energy.
Descriptions of students learning may be misinterpreted by the parents.
Fail to provide a systematic and organized information
10. Portfolio
The teachers of some good schools prepare complete portfolio of their students. Portfolio is actually cumulative record of a student which reflects his/her strengths and weaknesses in different subjects over the period of the time. It indicates what strategies were used by the teacher to overcome the learning difficulties of the students. It also shows students’ progress periodically which indicates his/her trend of improvement. Developing portfolio is really a hard task for the teacher, as he/she has to keep all record of students such as teacher’s lesson plans, tests, students’ best pieces of works, and their assessments records in an academic year.
An effective portfolio is more than simply a file into which student work products are placed. It is a purposefully selected collection of work that often contains commentary on the entries by both students and teachers.
No doubt, portfolio is a good tool for student’s assessment, but it has three limitations. First, it is a time consuming process. Second, teacher must possess the skill of developing portfolio which is most of the time lacking. Third, it is ideal for small class size and in Pakistani context, particularly at elementary level, class size is usually large and hence the teacher cannot maintain portfolio of a large class.
11. Report Cards
There is a practice of report cards in many good educational institutions in many countries including Pakistan. Many parents desire to see the report cards or progress reports in written form issued by the schools. Although a good report card explains the achievement of students in terms of scores or marks, conduct and behaviour, participation in class activities etc. Well written comments can offer parents and students’ suggestions as to how to make improvements in specific academic or behavioural areas. These provide teachers opportunities to be reflective about the academic and behavioural progress of their students. Such reflections may result in teachers gaining a deeper understanding of each student’s strengths and needs for improvement. Bruadli (1998) has divided words and phrases into three categories about what to include and exclude from written comments on report cards.
A. Words and phrases that promote positive view of the student
1. Gets along well with people
2. Has a good grasp of …
3. Has improved tremendously
4. Is a real joy to have in class
5. Is well respected by his classmates
6. Works very hard
B. Words and phrases to convey the students need help
1. Could benefit from …
2. Finds it difficult at time to …
3. Has trouble with …
4. Requires help with …
5. Needs reinforcement in …
C. Words and phrases to avoid or use with extreme caution
1. Always
2. Never
3. Can’t )or unable to)
4. Won’t
Report card usually carries two shortcomings: a) regardless of how grades are assigned, students and parents tend to use them normatively; and b) many students and parents (and some teachers) believe that grades are far more precise than they are. In most grading schemes, an ‘F’ denotes to fail or unsatisfactory. Hall (1990) and Wiggins (1994) state that not only grades imprecise, they are vague in their meaning. They do not provide parents or students with a thorough understanding of what has been learned or accomplished.
12. Parent-teacher conferences
Parent-teacher conferences are mostly used in elementary schools. In such conferences portfolio are discussed. This is a two-way flow of information and provides much information to the parents. But one of the limitations is that many parents don’t come to attend the conferences. It is also a time consuming activity and also needs sufficient funds to hold conferences.
Literature also highlights ‘parent-student-teacher conference’ instead ‘parent-teacher conference’, as student is also one of the key components of this process since he/she is directly benefitted. In many developed countries, it has become the most important way of informing parents about their children’s work in school. Parent-teacher conferences are productive when these are carefully planned and the teachers are skilled and committed.
The parent-teacher conference is an extremely useful tool, but it shares three important limitations with informal letter. First, it requires a substantial amount of time and skills. Second, it does not provide a systematic record of student’s progress. Third, some parents are unwilling to attend conferences, and they can’t be enforced.
Parent-student-teacher conferences are frequently convened in many states of the USA and some other advanced countries. In the US, this has become a striking feature of Charter Schools. Some schools rely more on parent conferences than written reports for conveying the richness of how students are doing or performing. In such cases, a school sometimes provides a narrative account of student’s accomplishments and status to augment the parent conferences. (www.uscharterschools.org).
13. Other ways of reporting students results to parents
There are also many other ways to enhance communication between teacher and parent, e.g. phone calls. The teachers should contact telephonically to the parents of the children to let them inform about child’s curriculum, learning progress, any special achievement, sharing anecdote, and invite parents in open meetings, conferences, and school functions.
1. Raw scores
The raw score is simply the number of points received on a test when the test has been scored according to the directions. For example, if a student responds to 65 items correctly on an objective test in which each correct item counts one point, the raw score will be 65.
Although a raw score is a numerical summary of student’s test performance, it is not very meaningful without further information. For example, in the above example, what does a raw score of 35 mean? How many items were in the test? What kinds of the problems were asked? How the items were difficult?
2. Grade norms
Grade norms are widely used with standardized achievement tests, especially at elementary level. The grade equivalent that corresponds to a particular raw score identifies the grade level at which the typical student obtains that raw score. Grade equivalents are based on the performance of students in the norm group in each of two or more grades.
3. Percentile ranking
A percentile is a score that indicates the rank of the score compared to others (same grade/age) using a hypothetical group of 100 students. In other words, a percentile rank (or percentile score) indicates a student’s relative position in the group in terms of percentage of students.
Percentile rank is interpreted as the percentage of individuals receiving scores equal or lower than a given score. A percentile of 25 indicates that the student’s test performance is equal or exceeds 25 out of 100 students on the same measure.
4. Standard scores
A standard score is also derived from the raw scores using the normal information gathered when the test was developed. Instead of indicating a student’s rank compared to others, standard scores indicate how far above or below the average (Mean) an individual score falls, using a common scale, such as one with an average of 100. Basically standard scores express test performance in terms of standard deviation (SD) from the Mean. Standard scores can be used to compare individuals of different grades or age groups because all are converted into the same numerical scale. There are various forms of standard scores such as z-score, T-score, and stanines.
Z-score expresses test performance simply and directly as the number of SD units a raw score is above or below the Mean. A z-score is always negative when the raw score is smaller than Mean. Symbolic representation can be shown as: z-score = X-M/SD.
T-score refers to any set of normally distributed standard cores that has a Mean of 50 and SD of 10. Symbolically it can be represented as: T-score = 50+10(z).
Stanines are the simplest form of normalized standard scores that illustrate the process of normalization. Stanines are single digit scores ranging from 1 to 9. These are groups of percentile ranks with the entire group of scores divided into nine parts, with the largest number of individuals falling in the middle stanines, and fewer students falling at the extremes (Linn & Gronlund, 2000).
5. Norm reference test and traditional letter-grade system
It is the most easiest and popular way of grading and reporting system. The traditional system is generally based on grades A to F. This rating is generally reflected as: Grade A
(Excellent), B (Very Good), C (Good), D (Satisfactory/Average), E (Unsatisfactory/ Below Average), and F (Fail).
This system does truly assess a student’s progress in different learning domains. First shortcoming is that using this system it is difficult to interpret the results. Second, a student’s performance is linked with achievement, effort, work habits, and good behaviour; traditional letter-grade system is unable to assess all these domains of a student. Third, the proportion of students assigned each letter grade generally varies from teacher to teacher. Fourth, it does not indicate patterns of strengths and weaknesses in the students (Linn & Gronlund, 2000). Inspite of these shortcomings, this system is popular in schools, colleges and universities.
6. Criterion reference test and the system of pass-fail
It is a popular way of reporting students’ progress, particularly at elementary level. In the context of Pakistan, as majority of the parents are illiterate or hardly literate, therefore they have concern with ‘pass or fail’ about their children’s performance in schools. This system is mostly used for courses taught under a pure mastery learning approach i.e. criterion-referenced testing.
This system has also many shortcomings. First, as students are declared just pass or fail (successful or unsuccessful) so many students do not work hard and hence their actual learning remains unsatisfactory or below desired level. Second, this two-category system provides less information to the teacher, student and parents than the traditional letter-grade (A, B, C, D) system. Third, it provides no indication of the level of learning.
7. Checklist of Objectives
To provide more informative progress reports, some schools have replaced or supplemented the traditional grading system with a list of objectives to be checked or rated. This system is more popular at elementary school level. The major advantage of this system is that it provides a detailed analysis of the students’ strengths and weaknesses. For example, the objectives for assessing reading comprehension can have the following objectives.
Reads with understanding
Works out meaning and use of new words
Reads well to others
Reads independently for pleasure (Linn & Gronlund, 2000).
8. Rating scales
In many schools students’ progress is prepared on some rating scale, usually 1 to 10, instead letter grades; 1 indicates the poorest performance while 10 indicates as the excellent or extra-ordinary performance. But in the true sense, each rating level corresponds to a specific level of learning achievement. Such rating scales are also used by the evaluation of students for admissions into different programmes at university level. Some other rating scales can also be seen across the world.
In rating scales, we generally assess students’ abilities in the context of ‘how much’, ‘how often’, ‘how good’ etc. (Anderson, 2003). The continuum may be qualitative such as ‘how good a student behaves’ or it may quantitative such as ‘how much marks a student got in a test’. Developing rating scales has become a common practice now-a-days, but still many teachers don’t possess the skill of developing an appropriate rating scale in context to their particular learning situations.
9. Letters to parents/guardians
Some schools keep parents inform about the progress of their children by writing letters. Writing letters to parents is usually done by a fewer teachers who have more concern with their students as it is a time consuming activity. But at the same time some good teachers avoid to write formal letters as they think that many aspects are not clearly interpreted. And some of the parents also don’t feel comfortable to accept such letters.
Linn and Gronlund (2000) state that although letters to parents might provide a good supplement to other types of reports, their usefulness as the sole method of reporting progress is limited by several of the following factors.
Comprehensive and thoughtful written reports require excessive amount of time and energy.
Descriptions of students learning may be misinterpreted by the parents.
Fail to provide a systematic and organized information
10. Portfolio
The teachers of some good schools prepare complete portfolio of their students. Portfolio is actually cumulative record of a student which reflects his/her strengths and weaknesses in different subjects over the period of the time. It indicates what strategies were used by the teacher to overcome the learning difficulties of the students. It also shows students’ progress periodically which indicates his/her trend of improvement. Developing portfolio is really a hard task for the teacher, as he/she has to keep all record of students such as teacher’s lesson plans, tests, students’ best pieces of works, and their assessments records in an academic year.
An effective portfolio is more than simply a file into which student work products are placed. It is a purposefully selected collection of work that often contains commentary on the entries by both students and teachers.
No doubt, portfolio is a good tool for student’s assessment, but it has three limitations. First, it is a time consuming process. Second, teacher must possess the skill of developing portfolio which is most of the time lacking. Third, it is ideal for small class size and in Pakistani context, particularly at elementary level, class size is usually large and hence the teacher cannot maintain portfolio of a large class.
11. Report Cards
There is a practice of report cards in many good educational institutions in many countries including Pakistan. Many parents desire to see the report cards or progress reports in written form issued by the schools. Although a good report card explains the achievement of students in terms of scores or marks, conduct and behaviour, participation in class activities etc. Well written comments can offer parents and students’ suggestions as to how to make improvements in specific academic or behavioural areas. These provide teachers opportunities to be reflective about the academic and behavioural progress of their students. Such reflections may result in teachers gaining a deeper understanding of each student’s strengths and needs for improvement. Bruadli (1998) has divided words and phrases into three categories about what to include and exclude from written comments on report cards.
A. Words and phrases that promote positive view of the student
1. Gets along well with people
2. Has a good grasp of …
3. Has improved tremendously
4. Is a real joy to have in class
5. Is well respected by his classmates
6. Works very hard
B. Words and phrases to convey the students need help
1. Could benefit from …
2. Finds it difficult at time to …
3. Has trouble with …
4. Requires help with …
5. Needs reinforcement in …
C. Words and phrases to avoid or use with extreme caution
1. Always
2. Never
3. Can’t )or unable to)
4. Won’t
Report card usually carries two shortcomings: a) regardless of how grades are assigned, students and parents tend to use them normatively; and b) many students and parents (and some teachers) believe that grades are far more precise than they are. In most grading schemes, an ‘F’ denotes to fail or unsatisfactory. Hall (1990) and Wiggins (1994) state that not only grades imprecise, they are vague in their meaning. They do not provide parents or students with a thorough understanding of what has been learned or accomplished.
12. Parent-teacher conferences
Parent-teacher conferences are mostly used in elementary schools. In such conferences portfolio are discussed. This is a two-way flow of information and provides much information to the parents. But one of the limitations is that many parents don’t come to attend the conferences. It is also a time consuming activity and also needs sufficient funds to hold conferences.
Literature also highlights ‘parent-student-teacher conference’ instead ‘parent-teacher conference’, as student is also one of the key components of this process since he/she is directly benefitted. In many developed countries, it has become the most important way of informing parents about their children’s work in school. Parent-teacher conferences are productive when these are carefully planned and the teachers are skilled and committed.
The parent-teacher conference is an extremely useful tool, but it shares three important limitations with informal letter. First, it requires a substantial amount of time and skills. Second, it does not provide a systematic record of student’s progress. Third, some parents are unwilling to attend conferences, and they can’t be enforced.
Parent-student-teacher conferences are frequently convened in many states of the USA and some other advanced countries. In the US, this has become a striking feature of Charter Schools. Some schools rely more on parent conferences than written reports for conveying the richness of how students are doing or performing. In such cases, a school sometimes provides a narrative account of student’s accomplishments and status to augment the parent conferences. (www.uscharterschools.org).
13. Other ways of reporting students results to parents
There are also many other ways to enhance communication between teacher and parent, e.g. phone calls. The teachers should contact telephonically to the parents of the children to let them inform about child’s curriculum, learning progress, any special achievement, sharing anecdote, and invite parents in open meetings, conferences, and school functions.
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