Return to search

Cut Once, Measure Everywhere: The Stability of Percentage of Students Above a Cut Score

Large-scale assessment results for schools, school boards/districts, and entire provinces or states are commonly reported as the percentage of students achieving a standard – that is, the percentage of students scoring above the cut score that defines the standard on the assessment scale. Recent research has shown that this method of reporting is sensitive to small changes in the cut score, especially when comparing results across years or between groups. This study extends that work by investigating the effects of reporting group size on the stability of results. For each of ten group sizes, 1000 samples with replacement were drawn from the May 2009 Ontario Grade 6 Assessment of Reading, Writing and Mathematics. The results showed that for small group sizes – analogous to small schools – there is little confidence and that extreme caution must be taken when interpreting differences observed between years or groups.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/24579
Date26 July 2010
CreatorsHollingshead, Lynne Marguerite
ContributorsChilds, Ruth A.
Source SetsUniversity of Toronto
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

Page generated in 0.0018 seconds