By Michelle Storie So you just received your child’s State ELA or Math Assessment scores. Or your child just underwent a psychological evaluation and completed individually-administered norm-referenced tests. What do the scores mean? How do you make sense of the information provided? And what do the test results tell you? How can they help your child? In this blog, we hope to answer the basics to these questions. Standardized tests are norm-referenced tests. This means that the tests are given the same way to all children. Evaluators follow rules for test administration and are not permitted to alter materials or reword questions. This allows you to compare your child’s score to that of other individuals his or her age who were part of the norming sample. When the tests are created, they are administered to groups of students of varying ages and the results are used to determine what was considered an Average score, a Below Average score, etc. A standardized test allows you to draw a comparison between your child’s score and the scores of other individuals of the same age (or grade, if using grade-based scores).
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Written by Dr. Sheila Clonan 9/5/15 at 8:05 pm If you live in Central New York and are looking for out of school resources to have your child tested for educational issues such as learning disabilities, dyslexia, ADHD, giftedness, school anxiety, or behavioral issues, you may find the search daunting. The fact is that outside of the public school system, there is a shortage of qualified professionals offering comprehensive psychoeducational testing services for children. This is especially true in Central New York or the areas between Binghamton, Watertown, Rochester, and Utica, where specialized services can be challenging to find. I’ve had many parents tell me that they were given a list of providers by their school or physician, called all 15-20 phone numbers only to find most disconnected, no longer in practice, or not qualified to provide the desired service.
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