Chapter 5- Formal Assessment

Just thinking about "Formal Assessment" is kinda scary. I personally hate the pressure of a formal assessment. I start to freak out and second guess myself. Imagine how the kids feel. In the book it says that standard scores can be used to compare them to other students and other peers. I have personally ran into using standard scores to identify a learning disablity. I have had students not be identified as LD because of this also. The students that are identified are only in certain areas. Even in some cause they can score lower than average in almost everything, but they are not low enough so they say the student is performing based on their IQ level. One kind of assessment that I really liked (because I have never seen it before) was the Kaufman test. I like the nonsense word decoding subtest because you get to see if the students know there phonics. I feel our school does not give reliable fluency test. The Woodcock Johnson test meausres fluency by being timed. Our school only does TPRI or Running records. There is no formal way to measure that. In formal testing the book talked about being test bias. Even though the publishers and the authors look at this, they still just want to sell there product. I feel cultural characterisitics and background can effect the results of the test.