Nama : Vira

Class : X Science 1
Theme : Do Standarized Test Really Reveal Student Knowledge

When Done Right, Standardized Tests Reveal a

Student's Knowledge
If the teacher makes the test so easy that many students get all the questions right, she will
have created what test designers call a “ceiling effect.” The teacher cannot distinguish which
students have a high level of knowledge from those with a low level of knowledge — test scores
all being 100 percent means students look the same. Their true abilities are somewhere above
their score, which forms a “ceiling.”

The same concept applies in the other direction. If the test is so hard few students get any
questions right, a “floor effect” arises. If many students get a score of zero, a teacher cannot
distinguish between knowledge levels of her students. Their true abilities lie below the floor.

A test with no ceiling or floor effects needs to have questions with higher and lower degrees of
difficulty. Students with strong knowledge are able to answer the harder questions and
students with weaker knowledge are not. The teacher might then give students with strong
knowledge an “A” grade and students with weaker knowledge a “C.”

On a much larger scale, this process is used to create assessments such as the PARCC test (the
acronym stands for the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers),
Smarter Balanced, and the Texas STAAR test, which stands for the State of Texas Assessment of
Academic Readiness. Each of these tests is designed by teams of educators and testing experts
working in concert (here is a visualization of the process).

Designing the tests starts with the standards, and educators and testing experts develop banks
of questions related to those standards, such as the algebra ones above. Questions in the
question bank are scrutinized to ensure they test what the standards call for, and that their
wording is clear and not inappropriate, or “biased,” against any race or gender.

For example, a math question that involves calculating a baseball player’s batting average might
have an issue that some students may not play baseball or are otherwise unfamiliar with its
rules. Revising the wording to be about calculating a simple average (without referencing
baseball) might be the solution, or simply substituting another question.

Each question on the PARCC tests was reviewed by 30 or more people before it was used.
Questions that made the cut were then pilot-tested in 14 states and nearly 16,000 schools.
Smarter Balanced followed a similar process, testing more than 5,000 items in 21 states and
more than 5,000 schools
Nama : Vira
Class : X Science 1
Theme : Do Standarized Test Really Reveal Student Knowledge
At any grade level, the test is likely to contain at least a few really hard questions, ones that
may seem well beyond the abilities of students in that grade. Nobody expects fifth-graders to
comprehend a reading passage from Hamlet, for example. Students and teachers tend to
remember these kinds of questions, but the questions are not on the test simply to create pain
and discomfort.

Seeding the test with difficult questions avoids the ceiling effect, and test scores are better able
to discriminate between students who have a basic level of proficiency and students who have
an advanced level of proficiency. Some fifth-graders will comprehend that Hamlet passage. And
there might still be students who get all the questions wrong or right, but the likelihood of it
happening is rare.