This article was originally published in the June 16, 1999 edition of Los Angeles Times © 1999 Los Angeles Times

Interpreting the Stanford 9 Test By RICHARD LEE COLVIN Times Education Writer Curious about how well your 16-year-old has mastered "geometry from a synthetic perspective"? Or is your burning desire for information focused more on "geometry from an algebraic perspective"?      Fret not.      A little bit of insight on those two questions and many more will show up in a report from your son or daughter's school, arriving in the mailbox or your kid's backpack sometime before the end of July.      Be warned, though. California's $35-million Standardized Testing and Reporting program, commonly known as the Stanford 9, is about to disgorge data by the gigabyte covering student achievement in all of the state's 8,100 public schools.      Between the middle of March and the middle of May, the state administered tests in English to nearly 4.2 million students in grades 2 through 11. Depending on the grade, the tests probed their knowledge of math, science, social studies and language arts. Another 110,000 students statewide took tests in Spanish.      Now parents are finding out how well their children performed. Last year, in what was most districts' first year of the testing program, many complained that reports sent home contained too little information.      This year, some may complain that they contain far too much and may long for the simple A's and Bs of report cards of old.      Even the designers of the "parent report" acknowledge that it's so chock-full of data that many parents may find it intimidating. "We're giving them so much that a lot of parents are going to be left in the dust," said Dave Osberg, who is in charge of the Stanford 9 program for the Harcourt Educational Measurement Co.      But Harcourt officials and educators say there is a way to make sense of the more than 150 numbers that will be included in the reports for some grade levels.      When they receive the reports, parents should "sit down, take a deep breath, have a glass of wine and start asking questions," said Lynn Winters, an assistant superintendent in charge of testing in the Long Beach Unified School District.      "The most important question is, 'Is my kid doing as well as other kids in the country?"' she said.      The answer to that question can be found at the top of the report under "national percentile." A student at the 49th percentile in "total reading," for example, reads better than 49% of the students who were part of a national comparison group that took the test.      Parents with Internet access will be able to go to the Internet to see how their children compare to the rest of the students in their grade in the school, the district or the state. One address for that information is http://www.startest.com. Others can get reports from their school district.      Vera Vignes, superintendent of the Pasadena Unified School District, said parents should next look at the scores for the various parts of the total reading or math score. "They should look for strengths and weaknesses," she said.      She said parents can find even more detailed information under the part of the report labeled "content clusters." These scores break down math, for example, into topics. At the 10th grade, the topics include not only the two flavors of geometry but also trigonometry and other topics. (For the record, "synthetic geometry" involves the use of logic, and "algebraic geometry" relies on algebraic formulas to describe lines and shapes.)      "The content clusters give you a real good clue as to what is pulling a student's score up . . . and what is pulling it down," said Sandy Clifton, an assistant superintendent in the Redondo Beach Unified School District, who is president-elect of the Assn. of California School Administrators.      Those numbers can tell parents the areas in which students need to improve. But they can be misleading as well.      Some areas of the curriculum are covered by only a few questions on the test. Only three questions on the 10th-grade test, for example, deal with the "conceptual underpinnings of calculus." That's not really enough to indicate what a student really knows of that topic.      Moreover, said Clifton, a student might not have studied a particular topic. A ninth-grader who scores poorly on the geometry questions might not have taken a geometry class yet. At the very least, the more specific data can give parents a starting point in talking to teachers about the results.      Another area for parents to examine is how much the scores have changed from 1998, the first year of the test. For most students, the scores should stay about the same. That means they are making about the same amount of year-to-year progress as did the students who scored like them in the comparison group.      Dramatic changes in scores could mean that what a student has been taught is either more aligned with the questions on the test--or less.      But regardless of instruction, a student who scored high last year is more likely to see gains in his or her scores this year. That's because strong students are ahead of their classmates and more likely to move even further ahead.      Conversely, Osberg said, students whose scores were very low last year are among those likely to score even lower this year. "That kid was behind, and the more a kid is behind, the further behind they get," he said.      Still, Clifton said, drops of 10% or more should give parents and teachers reason to investigate.      "If you've got a kid who suddenly takes a big dip, that's a warning sign for us," she said. "Is it an attendance problem? Is there something going on in the home?"      The bottom portion of the parent report is the most problematic. It even comes with a warning from the state to not take it too seriously.      The two boxes labeled "California content standards" report how well a student did on questions customized by Harcourt to match the state's relatively new expectations for what students should learn in each grade. The expectations are ambitious. The questions, by all reports, were tough. And few students, even in the very best schools, are likely to get the majority of them correct.      In addition, no one will know until this year's results can be examined what constitutes a "good" score or a "bad" score. Scores "may be low for students in schools where many of the new standards have not been taught," the warning says.      Stands to reason. Few teachers have seen the standards, although they are available on the Internet at the state Department of Education Web site, http://www.cde.ca.gov/board/ board.html. And textbooks matching the standards in English and math were only selected this month.      Educators are uncomfortable with the state's warning, worrying that it makes it seem like they aren't doing their job. But they also don't want parents to panic. "I don't think they should pay a lot of attention to that," Vignes said.      Question:      Grade 3      Grade 5      Grade 8 High School      High School      # Source: Harcourt Educational Measurement Co      IG Inrerpreting the Stanford 9 Test