Developing a national frame of reference on student achievement by weighting student records from a state assessment

Abstract

Weighting the datasets to the nation was effective in making the state test score distributions more similar to the national distributions. Moreover, the stratification design that defined weighting cells by the joint distribution of median household income and ethnic composition of the school consistently produced desirable results for the six datasets used in each grade. Log-linear smoothing using a polynomial of degree 4 was effective in making the weighted distributions even more similar to those in the national sample. Investigation of the impact of using the percentile ranks derived from the state datasets revealed that the percentile ranks of the distributions that were most similar to the national distributions resulted in a high percentage of agreement when classifying student performance based on raw scores associated with the same percentile rank in each dataset. The utility of having a national frame of reference on student achievement, and the efficacy of estimating such a frame of reference from existing data are also discussed. v