Conditions Revealed by the Use of Standardized Tests in Rural Schools

Abstract

While making out the graph cards of individual pupils for grading purposes as described in my last article, I gradually became conscious of certain similar tendencies affecting the majority of graphs. Not only was the variation great among individuals in different subjects but there was a certain sameness in it that struck me as being significant of fundamental weaknesses in the school system. If the graphs had been on transparent cards and placed in a pile, their low and high points would have tended to coincide. That is, in certain subjects most of the pupils tended to grade high throughout the district while in other subjects they tended to grade low. In the accompanying figures the numbers at the left of the horizontal lines represent the grades, while those at the top of the vertical lines stand for the various subjects as follows: 1. Rate of silent reading 9. Writing, rate 2. Comprehension in reading 10. Writing, quality 3. Addition 11. Arithmetical reasoning 4. Subtraction 12. English organization 5. Multiplication 13. Visual vocabulary 6. Division 14. Language 7. Mixed fundamentals of arith15. Geography metic 16. History 8. Spelling In each of these figures the heavy horizontal line is drawn at the grade in which the pupil was placed as a result of the September testing. (See the third article of this series.) The solid lines show the grading of the pupils according to each of the tests at the beginning of the year; the broken lines show their grading at the end of the year. In interpreting these figures it should be remembered that the grading is based on June scores. In other words, if a child's score on any test equals the standard