Testing Students

Testing, also called assessment, is the procedures used to measure students on the education variables we are interested in. The purpose of a test is to assess students' aptitudes, achievements, knowledge, or skills. The result of testing is called the measurement. Generally, there are two separate testing strategies: criterion-referenced measurement and norm-referenced measurement.

In norm-referenced tests, a student's performance is compared to the scores of a well-defined norm group of students who have previously taken the same test. The norm group has the same characteristics as the students in the study, such as age and grade level. Therefore, this kind of test is called norm-referenced because educators interpret a student's test score to the performance of the norm-group; emphasis is not on the absolute amount of performance, but on the relative position (called percentile rank) of the student compared to the norm group. Thus, students with a percentile rank of 50 on a norm-referenced test score higher than or equal to 50% of the group with which they are compared.

In contrast, a criterion-referenced test is an absolute measurement because the score is interpreted by comparison to a standard or criterion. The student's test performance can be interpreted according to the degree to which the domain has been mastered. The purpose is to show how an individual student compares to some established level of performance. Rather than interpreting that a student has “scored better than 50% of the students in the norm group,” a criterion-referenced test is interpreted as a student having “mastered 50% of the test's content.”

The scores from a norm-referenced test can be used to decide whether a student should enroll in remedial courses. But the information from criterion-referenced tests does not give information about students' actual knowledge. The inference from the test scores relies on whether or not the expected knowledge in a particular school district matches the content of the norm-referenced test.

On the other hand, criterion-referenced tests specify, on each test content included in that test, how well students have mastered the content. Therefore it is easier to match the knowledge and skills expected by the school district with a criterion-referenced test. If the content of the criterion-referenced test matches the content that is expected by the school district, the criterion-referenced test gives more information about the extent to which students have mastered the content than a norm-referenced test.