Testing Students

Xiaogeng Sun

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 ...

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