Standardized testing compares a student’s achievement against the performance of students of the same age or grade level in the general public. The Evaluation of Basic Skills (EBS) compares the student tested with age level equivalents in the general public.
With the EBS, it is easy to trasnalte raw scores of the student with norm data on a convenient chart provided right on the test form itself. In this way, you can quickly and accurately see the student’s relative academic abiltiy in comparison with avergage age-level performance in the general public.
Conventional standardized tests have many negative features, which discourage their effective practical use in the educational setting, including the following:
- Complicated to administer;
- Restrictive in use; sometimes requiring the services of a person specifically qualified to administer the test;
- Controlled by company; i.e., the test may require control of results by an external testing service;
- Time-consuming; sometimes requiring hours of detailed questioning;
- Fact-based; not concept understanding; e.g., words problems may not follow phonetic sequence and regularity; math with difficult calculations do not isolate the particular concept difficulty.
- Tied to specific curriculum, which may not sequence learning by concept understanding.