What are 'standardised scores' (Average is 100 apparently)

[rebby]

Hello,

Last week I did a tour at a school and they talked about standardised scores which help them monitor a child's progress. Apparently the UK average is 100, this school aims for 115. What is this? My children haven't been given any scores (I have twins in year 4 but they're not happy there). I'd like to know where they are on the national average scale so if anyone can shed light on what this is before I approach their current school I'd be grateful.

What were the standardised scores a test of?

Standardised scores show how the child is doing in comparrison to their age. ie. If a child was 8 years 4 months old and performed exactly as you would expect for an 8.4yr old then their standardised score would be 100.

If the child performed as you would expect a 8 yr 10 month old they might have a standardised score of 105 or 108 or some other number above 100.

If they performed as expected for a 7Yr old they would score 85 or 90 or some other number under 100.

All people take a test so rather than being told you have scored 85% they look at everybody who has ever taken the test and say actually most people who take the test score 85% so you are average - standardised score of 100. Someone else takes the test and scores 90%. Only a few people taking the test ever score 90% so they get a higher standardised score.

A standardised score usually has an exact average of 100, but anything between the exact average and 1 standard deviation is considered an average mark so usually from 85 to 115. Two standard deviations away is above/below average and three standard deviations away is considered exceptional - usually covers about 2% of the population - if you were testing IQ for MENSA on a standardised scale then this 3standard deviations from the average would be the pass mark.

A lot (some?) of schools do CAT test tests in year 4 which are basically an intelligence test which are used to predict SATS test results - they can show if a child is underachieving and needs help to achieve what they really can achieve, rather than just using their KS1 SATS results as a prediction for KS2 results. I would have thought these are the tests that the head is talking about, but I don't see how a)they can actually increase a child of below average IQ to start with to a child with above average IQ - a few points maybe but not by 10s of points.
and b) I don't see why it is useful to the school to increase the results in these tests as they aren't used for anything other than SATS predictions (as far as I am aware).

Does any of that help at all?

It was a private school so not sure if that makes any difference. The scores were for English, Maths and Spelling. She also mentioned reading age...

Ah, we do do tests for reading which have a standardised score. Whereas some reading tests give you an age outcome e.g. your 7 year old has a reading age of 7 and 3 months some give a standardised score. We are working to get all our reading tests above a certain standard score.

Basically they are saying that in maths, English and spelling they work to get all their children into a national 'above average' level as 115 tends to be the cut off from average to above average.

Standardised scores are a hell of a lot more useful than SATS levels or similar. As explained above, they measure ability and potential in Maths and English against your child's age in years and months, not against the year group as a whole (it's a massively unfair measure to do the latter IMO).

115 would be in stanine 7 or "above average" category.

Tests of this kind (i.e giving a standardised score) are 'normed' by testing a great many children in whatever area is being tested and, as LMG says, the most common score is taken as the 'norm' and becomes the standardised score of 100.

There is a problem with this in that the tests merely reflect what the sample tested has been taught. Whem I was testing for reading ages using a very old word reading test it was noticable that the first 50 or so words were those which would have been taught as 'high frequency words' or would have been very common in Look & Say reading scheme books. Of course, this reflected the way that the test sample would have been taught. A child of, say, 6 could get a reading age of 6+ just by knowing a few HFWs but be completely unable to decode and blend any non HFWs!

I was testing Y7s. It was interesting to see that they could read the HFWs but most words of 2 or more syllables were completely beyond them and their decoding skills were very poor. They usually achieved a RA of about 7 - 8.

What I am trying to say (until diverted by the ever fascinating topic of reading failure ) is that tests can't always disclose a child's actual ability; they might be capable of far,far more than what is covered by the 'norms'.