Rumor has it that this week Florida students and parents will finally receive the much-anticipated Florida Standards Assessment scores from the first round of testing taken this past spring. But what will parents receive, and what do the scores mean?

Engage the Brain will focus on grade levels 3-8 for both the English Language Arts (ELA) and math tests. When you open the envelope, parents, you will want to focus on two scores: The percentile rank and the T score. The percentile rank will tell you how your child did in comparison to the other students who took the test in the same grade level. For example, if your child receives a 68 percentile score that tells you your child did better than 68 percent of the students who took the test. Conversely, 32 percent of the students who took the same test did better than your child.

T scores are a little trickier to understand. They are essentially another way to report a percentile score. The T scores are reported on a scale of 20 – 80 with 50 equaling the 50 percentile. On the graph below, the sd stands for standard deviation, which is the amount of variation in a set of data.

You will be able to see how many questions there were in each sub-section of the tests and how many questions your child answered correctly; all useful information.

What will be missing are the proficiency band scores ranging from a low of 1 to a high of 5. The state has not finalized the ranges yet. On the FCAT, the FSA’s predecessor, a score of 3 was deemed proficient or on grade level.

Where the state places these proficiency bands is critical. Make the bands too tough and too many students will fail the test. Make them too easy and the test looks foolish. School grades and teacher evaluations also ride on the scores.

Many common sensed individuals have called for a high stakes moratorium for one year. They say, ‘Don’t use the scores to determine school grades or teacher evaluations.’ These same people have asked to use the first implementation of the test as a baseline only. Then next spring the state will have scores to compare the second round of tests to, comparing apples to apples.

This January the Florida Department of Education is to finalize the scoring bands. Presumably parents will receive a follow up report to the one they will receive this week informing them of their child’s proficiency score.

Should you have any questions about your child’s FSA scores, Engage the Brain would be happy to discuss the results and answer any questions.