3rd, 6th Grade Test Scores Rise but 8th Grade Drops

California’s third and sixth grade students scored major gains again this year in standardized test scores, but eighth grade scores dropped in two of three basic areas, state schools chief Bill Honig said today.

“There’s a steady increase--actually a growing increase,” in reading, writing and mathematics test scores of third and sixth graders, Honig told the state Board of Education. “The whole country is moving up rapidly, and we’re moving up with the country.”

But, Honig said, eighth grade scores are “disquieting,” with a big drop in reading from 1984 scores, a lesser decline in writing and other verbal skills and a slight increase in mathematics.

“We’ve got some major work to do in the middle schools and junior highs. They’ve been a neglected area in the whole reform movement,” Honig said, noting that high school test scores released two months ago also showed substantial increases.

Summarized Test Results

The report summarized standard achievement tests given last spring in all 1,000 local California school districts. Individual district scores are to be released in about two weeks, Honig’s office said.

Honig’s report used test scores in the 1979-80 school year in California as a base, assigning those statewide scores a value of 250 points for comparison with future years.

On that scale, third grade reading was up 6 points over last year, to 274, written language skills were up 7 points to 279 and mathematics were up 4 points to 278. That was the fifth consecutive year of rising scores in each category.

At the sixth grade level, reading scores, which had fallen below the 1979-80 standard last year, gained 4 points to 253, writing was up 5 points to 265 and mathematics was up 3 points to 264.

But the eighth grade testing, which started just one year ago, showed on the same scale a 10-point drop for reading, a 4-point drop in written language skills and a 1-point increase in mathematics.

He added that nearly all the decline in eighth grade scores was among boys, while eighth grade girls as a group scored “essentially the same” as last year’s eighth grade girls.