Hello Assessment List:

Here's the bind we have been in forever:

The standardized tests like the TABE tell us little
about what is really go on, but they are required,
easy to administer, and give us a "score."  Other
assessments--formal and informal--give lots of
information about what is really going on but they
take too much time and are not considered "valid and
reliable" scores. 

I would discourage people from using the TABE to
analyze students' reading abilities. The TABE is not
even a great indicator of reading level or progress,
and I think any analysis of students' skill sets based
on the TABE is really shaky--no matter what the
publishers who make tons of money on the TABE say.

It takes a lot more time to do one-on-one assessments
where you ask students to read something--silently
and/or aloud--note their errors and ask them questions
about it. But that is definitely worth analyzing. 

Also,  I think the TABE is a particularly bad
standardized test.  

A few comments:
--If students scores high on the TABE, they are pretty
much guaranteed to be good readers (and a good test
takers)
--If students scores low on the TABE:
they might be poor readers, 
they might have been tripped up by this bad test:
maybe they needed more time to read well
maybe they got nervous, 
maybe they read and understood every bit of the TABE
but picked the wrong answers
or maybe something else was wrong--they were tired,
distracted by something in their personal lives,
hungry, or sick. 

from Bruce Carmel
Turning Point
Brooklyn NY



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