Anonymous wrote:After reading the passionate posts on this board about age norming, I got a little curious and googled it. I found this Riverside Publishing Guide for Teachers:
http://faculty.education.uiowa.edu/dlohman/pdf/CogAT%206%20short%20guide%20for%20teachers.pdf
Page two describes how the publisher norms the Cogat for Age and Grade. Interestingly, although they do norm by month so as to capture the most appropriate comparison of age peers, the publisher actually recommends that for students who are much younger or much older than the typical student in the grade, it is more appropriate to use GRADE norms, not age norms when the test is used for academic purposes (please see the highlighted area below).
Additionally, the publisher also recommends (as an option) using local district norming over national norming when the district has a population whose scores usually deviate much higher, or much lower than the rest of the country (see paragraph 2).
I found this very interesting. So based on this document created by the publisher, it seems that the cries that fcps is not following publisher guidelines, or that the district is opening itself up for lawsuits is a bit off base to say the least. From the way I am reading the document, it seems like fcps is exactly following the publishers recommendations, re age vs grade norming, and local vs national norming.
I included a link to the document in case you want to see for yourself.
Grade Norms. The grade norms provided for CogAT cover the range from kindergarten
through grade 12 for three test periods in the school year—fall, midyear, and spring. Although
the majority of students in a particular grade fall within a narrow age range, some
individuals are much younger or older than the typical student. For example, at the beginning
of first grade, the majority of students are likely to range in age from 6 years and 2 months to
7 years; however, there are students in some first-grade classes who are 5 years and 9 months
old and some who are 8 years old. When a student’s age is typical for the group, the student’s
age and grade scores will be identical or nearly so. However, if individuals are very young for
the grade, their age scores will be higher than their grade scores. If individuals are much
older than the typical student in the grade, their grade scores will be higher than their age
scores. For individuals who are younger or older than the typical student in a grade, grade
norms, rather than age norms, are more appropriate to use when trying to understand the
students’ academic performance.
Local Norms. In some school systems, the characteristics of the student population differ
markedly from those of a national sample of school-age children. When national norms are
used in these districts, the scores of students on both achievement and ability tests are likely
to be skewed toward the high or low extremes of the score distribution. Local norms provide
another perspective by comparing the performance of each student to others in the local
norm group.
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