Key Ideas

Key Ideas

• After test administration, national assessment teams must allocate time, space, and resources to score and record student responses. Advance planning for these activities becomes more important as the volume of data being collected increases. • When student responses are scored and recorded, it is important that assessment teams develop a data codebook that maps each assessment item to its variable label in the data set, variable codes for the response options, variable formats, and codes for missing values. • Codebooks are valuable resources internally for the team and externally for stakeholders to conduct secondary analyses. • Providing a summary description of student performance constitutes the core of the main results report. The approach used to summarize and report on student performance should be determined during test development and driven by the information needs of stakeholders. • Norm-referenced reporting answers questions about the average proficiency of students who completed the assessment and the types of students who are more likely to perform above or below average. • Standard-referenced reporting is increasingly common and addresses questions about what students know and can do and which students have mastered the expected learning content. • Correlation coefficients are commonly used to describe the relationship between contextual factors and student achievement. • Correlation is not causation, and causal relationships are difficult to establish using data typically collected from large-scale assessments.