Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing

Let's Go Learn and the
Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing

Overview: 

The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing were established to help assessment developers and assessment administrators evaluate various tests or assessments.  In short, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing are best practices that cover key areas that must be considered when developing an assessment.  The standards cover three main areas that ask these fundamental questions: 1) Was the test constructed according to best assessment practices?  2) Is the test a fair assessment for the actual population of test takers to which it is likely to be given?  3)  Are results used in a valid, fair, and open way?

How DORA and DOMA series assessments address key questions of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing:

Standards Part I:  Was  the test constructed according to best assessment practices? 

Let's Go Learn developed its math and reading assessments first with reading and mathematics specialists, teachers and students in mind, and then with the eye of a psychometrician or evaluator.  Each assessment was guided by leading mathematics and reading experts from UC Berkeley, together with a team of reading specialists and mathematics teachers from schools representing populations of students ranging from high to low socioeconomic levels.  Reading and mathematics experts and teachers helped identify the best practices in assessment and instruction for each field.  They set the guidelines for the development and on-going review of these criteria which have been the roadmap for the item development in Let's Go Learn's assessments. 

Following assessment content construction by experts and teachers, Let's Go Learn employed the guidance of a psychometrician from UC Berkeley to create the protocol to assure that each LGL assessment measure provided sound, statistically significant information.  In addition to correlations studies which looked at how well Let's Go Learn's assessments correlated to other popular assessments, Let's Go Learn has conducted p-value evaluations, item response theory (IRT) studies, and test/re-test studies.  The procedures taken to construct LGL's statistically sound reading and mathematics assessments both create assessment content and practices useful to teachers and insure that the items in each assessment are both valid and reliable.

Standards Part II:  Is the test a fair assessment for the actual population of test takers to which it is likely to be given? 

Let's Go Learn's assessments were designed with the goal of characterizing the individual reading and mathematics profiles of each individual child. Every subtest in LGL's assessment products was developed to reduce error due to test bias on multiple levels including race, socioeconomic status, and gender.  Content for most items on the LGL test were derived from materials students would encounter in a typical classroom.  To ensure that assessments are accessible and comprehensible to every student, LGL has taken the following measures: The procedures for every item are modeled for students.  Students are given opportunities to repeat instructions for further clarification.  Visual and audio support was also designed to facilitate test taking, especially for special needs students and second language learners.  Furthermore, the Let's Go Learn assessment products increase and/or decrease item difficulty according to students' levels of success on any given assessment.  In addition, Let's Go Learn's assessments have been approved by the California Department of Education for legal and social compliance.

Standards Part III:  Are the results used in a valid, fair, and open way? 

The LGL assessments report both diagnostic qualitative and quantitative information.  Because the goal of Let's Go Learn's assessments is to provide users with information that would help accelerate the academic achievement of students, the results of the assessment do not attempt to provide information that heavily endorses one pedagogical approach over another.  Instead, they provide both raw profile data, as well as general recommendations that can be useful for multiple pedagogical approaches, depending on the specific needs of a particular child.

Let's Go Learn has taken great efforts to clearly explain to clients the nature of LGL's assessment results and the extent to which the results can be used and interpreted.  As part of these efforts, Let's Go Learn advertises that the assessments it offers are criterion-referenced and diagnostic.  As such, they should be treated and used in a manner conducive to those kinds of assessment.  To further clarify the uses of LGL's assessment results, we offer schools training in how to interpret and utilize their assessment data.