Test Data May Stump Unprepared Parents

Curious about how well your 16-year-old has mastered “geometry from a synthetic perspective”? Or is your burning desire for information focused more on “geometry from an algebraic perspective”?

Fret not.

A little bit of insight on those two questions and many more will show up in a report from your son or daughter’s school, arriving in the mailbox or your kid’s backpack sometime before the end of July.

Be warned, though. California’s $35-million Standardized Testing and Reporting program, commonly known as the Stanford 9 or STAR test, is about to disgorge data by the gigabyte covering student achievement in all of the state’s 8,100 public schools.

Between the middle of March and the middle of May, the state administered tests to more than 4 million students in grades 2 through 11. Depending on the grade, the tests probed their knowledge of math, science, social studies and language arts. Now parents are finding out how well their children performed--in great, and perhaps confusing, detail.

Even the designers of the “parent report” acknowledge that it’s so chock-full of data that many parents may find it intimidating. “We’re giving them so much that a lot of parents are going to be left in the dust,” said Dave Osberg, who is in charge of the Stanford 9 program for the Harcourt Educational Measurement Co.

The most important place to start, said Lynn Winters, an assistant superintendent in the Long Beach Unified School District, is with the question, “Is my kid doing as well as other kids in the country?”

The answer can be found at the top of the report under “national percentile.” A student at the 49th percentile in “total reading,” for example, reads better than 49% of the students who were part of a national comparison group that took the test.

Parents with Internet access will be able to see how their children compare to the rest of the students in their grade in the school, the district or the state. One address for that information is http//www.startest.com. Others can get reports from their school district.

Vera Vignes, superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District, said parents next should look at the scores for the various parts of the total reading or math score. “They should look for strengths and weaknesses,” she said.

She said parents can find even more detailed information under the part of the report labeled “content clusters.” These scores break down math, for example, into topics. At the 10th grade, the topics include not only the two flavors of geometry but also trigonometry and other topics. (For the record, “synthetic geometry” involves the use of logic, and “algebraic geometry” relies on algebraic formulas to describe lines and shapes.)

Those numbers can tell parents where students need to improve. But they can be misleading as well. Some areas of the curriculum are covered by only a few test questions. Only three questions on the 10th-grade test, for example, deal with the “conceptual underpinnings of calculus.” That’s not enough to indicate what a student really knows on that topic.

Moreover, a student might not have studied a particular topic, said Sandy Clifton, an assistant superintendent in the Redondo Beach Unified School District who is president-elect of the Assn. of California School Administrators. A ninth-grader who scores poorly on geometry questions might not have taken a geometry class yet.

At the very least, the specific data can give parents a starting point in talking to teachers.

The bottom portion of the parent report is the most problematic. It even comes with a warning not to take it too seriously.

The two boxes labeled “California content standards” report how well a student did on questions customized by Harcourt to match the state’s relatively new standards for what students should learn in each grade. The expectations are ambitious. The questions, by all reports, were tough. And few students, even in the very best schools, are likely to get the majority of them correct.

In addition, no one will know until this year’s results can be examined what constitutes a “good” score or a “bad” score. Scores “may be low for students in schools where many of the new standards have not been taught,” the warning says.

Stands to reason. Few teachers have even seen the standards, although they are on the Internet at the state Department of Education Web site, http//www.cde.ca.gov/board/board.html. And textbooks matching the standards in English and math were only selected this month.