 |
| Home | About Us | Search | Publications | Links | Your State | Policy | Practice |
|
In School Testing, As In Public Opinion Polling, "Margin of Error" Matters "Gallup Goes To School" Shows Pitfalls of Reporting Test Results for Small Groups One of the many requirements of the federal "No Child Left Behind" Act (NCLB) is the public reporting of test results to document whether students are making "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) in school. As a result, newspapers across the country are now telling parents, students, teachers, and community members how schools are doing. In many cases, schools are being labeled as "failing" under NCLB. But what does it all mean? Researcher Theodore Coladarci of the University of Maine warns that, when it comes to reporting test scores--particularly those for small schools--a little caution is in order.  "Indicators of school-level achievement," Coladarci writes, "are subject to random year-to-year variation in much the same way that the results of an opinion poll will vary from one random sample to another. This variation, which is more pronounced for a small school, should be taken into account by education officials when evaluating school progress in a policy climate of high stakes" Coladarci, a respected rural education researcher who also is editor of Journal of Research in Rural Education, discusses this problem in a new paper titled Gallup Goes to School: The Importance of Confidence Intervals for Evaluating "Adequate Yearly Progress" in Small Schools. The paper is available at no charge from the Rural School and Community Trust (Rural Trust).
Download the Press Release (PDF file, 163Kb) Events | Services | Newsroom | Contact Us | Search © 2003 The Rural School and Community Trust 
|