‘It Provides a Wealth of Information’

The first edition of the Stanford Achievement Test was developed at Stanford University in Palo Alto and published in 1923. The population of California was about 4,270,000.

This year, the ninth edition of the Stanford Achievement Test (Stanford 9) was given to more than 4,150,000 California students, almost enough students to have populated the state 75 years ago. In the intervening years the population of California has increased almost tenfold, and the Stanford Achievement Test has become one of the most respected achievement tests in the world. It remains the most frequently administered student achievement test in the United States.

A norm-referenced test such as the Stanford 9 is certainly no substitute for the observation and judgment of the teacher who works with a student five to six hours a day, 180 days a year. But it does provide a wealth of information about how that student is doing in key areas. It also provides something that the teacher cannot--a comparison of the student’s performance with the performance of students throughout the United States on content that is representative of the content taught to other students in the same grade.

Because of our country’s tradition of local control of schools, there is not a “national” curriculum that is agreed upon and taught to every student in the country in the same sequence and at the same time of the school year. But there is enough agreement about schoolchildren and how they learn that there is some consensus about what needs to be taught and when it needs to be taught. The kind of reading that first-graders do is very different from the kind that third-graders do. The different mathematical operations (adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing) and their different levels of complexity (1, 2, 3 or more digit numbers, with and without regrouping of numbers) tend to come along about the same time for most students. Norm-referenced tests are constructed to reflect these general understandings.

The Stanford 9 scores that are reported for individual students tell us, within known margins of error, where students rank nationally in reading, written expression and mathematics (plus, for high school students, science and social studies). They tell us the student’s standing on the day that he or she took the test.

They do not tell us if the student will write a best-selling novel or invent a way of turning water into fuel, but they do give us a good idea of how well he or she can read, write or do math taught in a standard curriculum right now.

Because data as comprehensive as what we have produced this year have not been available in California for a long time, it is inevitable that people will make comparisons. Do students in Northern California perform as well as those in Southern California? Do students in the city perform as well as those in the suburbs? Some people will make all sorts of such comparisons, leading them to all sorts of conclusions. Others will reject such comparisons out of hand. Any conclusions should be tempered with basic good sense.

Our hope is that the information provided in the Stanford 9 summaries will be used widely and wisely to inform all those who make decisions about our schools, whether they be parents, students, taxpayers or legislators.