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Terranova Test Scores

July 11, 2006

Dear Parents,

Enclosed are your child's Terranova Achivement Test scores.

You will find two pieces of paper. The first, "Home Report," shows a bar graph.

Please note your child's "grade level." If your child is in grade 6.8, that means she took the test in the eighth month of sixth grade.

The gray band across the center of the page shows the range of scores for an average student. If your child's score falls in this range, congratulations! Your child is on grade level! If some of your child's scores are above average, that is even more wonderful. If some scores are below the average range, these pinpoint areas of concern for us to work on next year.

Please pay particular attention to the three most important scores, the Reading Composite, the Math Composite, and the Language Composite score. These are your child's overall scores; the other bars represent sub-tests that contribute to these overall scores. The Total Score is the average of these three scores.

On the second sheet you will find an Individual Profile. This is intended to help the teacher see exactly which problems on the test each child has answered incorrectly. Look at your child's percentile score for each individual performance objective. If your child's score on "Multiplying Whole Numbers," for instance, is relatively low, you will know you should work on the multiplication tables over the summer.

On the back of the Individual Profile, you will find some "Norm-Referenced" statistics which compare your child to others who took this test. The "NP," or National Percentile, is the same score which is shown on the bar graph on the Home Report. This score compares your child to every child across the United States who took this test. If your child scored 70% on a particular sub-test, it means he or she did better than 70% of all the children in the country who took this particular test.

Parents are often concerned when they see a score such as 75%. They may think that this means their child has only completed 75% of the test questions correctly. (That would mean a grade of C, so no wonder they are concerned.)

However, this is not the meaning of the percentile score. If your child has earned an NP score of 75%, this means your child is in the top 25% of all the students in his or her grade who took the test this year across the entire country. This puts your child in the top quarter of all students, an achievement of which we should all be proud.

"GME" or Grade Mean Equivalen is also a highly interesting score. A child may have a Grade Equivalent which is higher than his or her actual grade level. A child who is only in the eighth month of second grade (2.8), for instance, might have a Math score of 4.8.

This means that he did as well taking the second grade test as the average child in the eighth month of fourth grade. (It does not mean, however, that he did many fourth grade problems, because, unfortunately, there were only a few on the second grade test.)

We are simply amazed at some of the GME scores we see our students have earned this year.

One reason we administer Terranovas is to find areas of relative weakness which individual students need to work on.

We notice that several students need extra work on math computation. We urge you to make sure your child is spending some time each evening working computation problems as part of math homework. Sometimes, when students have moved on to conceptually difficult topics such as Pre-Algebra, we forget that they still need to practice multiplication and division just a little bit each day to keep up their skills and their speed.

We notice also that some students score somewhat lower in vocabulary than in other language areas. While vocabulary work is part of our curriculum, this work in school cannot take the place of wide reading to broaden a child's vocabulary.

It may be that, when parents see that their children are strong readers, they feel they do not need to do anything further to encourage reading at home.

But the more children read, the better they will perform on standardized reading and writing tests, and the better they will be prepared for college.

Is your child spending too much time on the computer, watching TV, or playing video games, and not enough time each day reading for pleasure? Even valuable scheduled activities such as soccer or music practice should not take the place of daily reading.

Even when children read a great deal on their own, they may be skipping unfamiliar words. You, as parents, need to take particular steps to make sure your child is learning new vocabulary words when he reads. You should ask your child to circle unfamiliar words or write them on a piece of paper. Then you should go over these words with your child, look back at the passage, and explain the meaning in context. If the words are unfamiliar to you, too, then you should look them up in a dictionary with your child, and go back and interpret the passage.

This is especially important for children whose families speak a second language at home. Even when your child is fluent in English, her vocabulary may suffer relative to third or fourth generation English speakers because you, yourself, do not use as rich a vocabulary as some others do. This is a very common issue for first and second generation Americans, especially when they speak Asian languages which do not share many cognate words with English.

I would like to share with you our school's statistics.

Our second graders' Grade Equivalent scores are as follows:

It is interesting to see that, even though this group of second graders contains a fair proportion for whom English is a second language, reading scores are well above grade level. Looking at the individual scores, we notice that the students for whom English is a second language scored about on the third grade level (still above grade level) compared to the others, who scored between 4th and 11th grade levels!

Next year, we intend to include a mix of reading works to address what we see as this relative weakness in some of our students. We will continue to stress reading and discussing of novels, but, in addition, we will add more "reading comprehension" activities such as exercises in finding the main idea of a paragraph and making inferences from short passages.

Our third graders' scores are as follows:

On average, our second and third graders performed as well as average 6th and 8th graders would have performed, had they taken this test. I find that amazing.

The scores in our Upper School are equally impressive:

Our Fourth Graders' average scores are as follows:

While it is hard to be dissatisfied with 4th graders' scores in the 8th–11th grade range, we notice that Language Mechanics — that is, punctuation — and Spelling are a bit lower than Reading and Vocabulary.

This has led us to re-evaluate the texts we used this year for these subjects for all Upper School students. Next year, we will return to using Language Roundup workbooks (as we did in past years) to review punctuation, combined with a weekly Dictation and Punctuation quiz.

For spelling this year, we had relied on editing individual writing assignments and on spelling the words in our Wordly Wise vocabulary books. But these books are way above grade level, and it is the simple words such as "their" and "what" which our students are continuing to misspell! So next year we''ll add a weekly test on grade-level spelling words.

Here are our Fifth Graders' average scores:

Our Sixth Graders' scores are as follows:

I note that our Fifth and Sixth Graders are performing as well as the average 12th and 11th Grader might do on this test.

We notice, however, that Math Computation is a bit lower than some of the other scores, and we're sorry to say that this means there will be more computation homework next year in the higher grades.

Our average 7th grade scores are as follows:

These are averages, of course. Individual students may have performed at less stellar levels. These scores are nearly all the maximum Grade Equivalent which could possibly be earned, the 9th month of 12th grade.

Our average 8th grade scores:

This year one of our graduating 8th graders, having taken tests one year above her nominal grade level throughout her years here, took the 9th grade test. Her scores were uniformly at the ceiling, 12.9.

Our 7th and 8th grade students are at the ceiling of the scores possible, the last month of 12th grade. Years of grading college papers lead me to believe that the average college student would not score as well on these exams as our middle school students do.

Our scores clearly show the cumulative advantage of each year spent at the Spring School.

Enjoy your summer! If you have any questions about your child's scores, please call me at school to discuss them. I am in and out of the office, but I will certainly return your call as soon as I can. We can also set up conferences with most teachers.

Sincerely, Dr. Deborah Knapp, Director

Copyright 2007 Dr. Deborah Knapp. All rights reserved.