Grade 3 OAT Multi-year Item Analysis

A couple of weeks ago I found a school in Cleveland that did an item analysis of every released item (including the practice test) for the Ohio Achievement test. I thought the information was interesting...so interesting and valuable for teachers that I posted about it.

As our training with Pat Terry several years ago revealed that not all indicators are of equal importance. All of the indicators are important and students should be accountable for all of them...but the fact remains that the state tests certain indicators more than others. I would like hope that these indicators or the most important ones for students to know in order to be better readers...not the indicators that are most easily tested.

I took the item analysis which was basically a table. I took that information from multiple years and plugged it into a spreadsheet to see if I could find any anything of interest.

As you can see Reading Process makes up the majority of the points on the test and Acquisition of Vocabulary makes up (just barely) the smallest % of the points. Within RP, compare/contrast,summarizing, and drawing conclusions are big. Central ideas (sorry for the Excel typo) appear to be overwhelming the most tested indicator at 60% of the points for that standard. Within Literary text, main idea and characters account for close to 70% of the points for that standard. Context clues are the biggest indicator for Aquisition of Vocabulary. What does this all mean....it gives us some idea where to spend our most time getting ready for the test. Not that we forget the other indicators....we just want to really make sure the kids "get" these indicators and have experience answering them in the same format that the test uses. Too often the test format trips up a student when we know they know the content. A teacher may sometimes accuse another teacher of "teaching to the test" when they use a strategy like this. In Ohio, I'm not sure how applicable that is...since the test is the standards is our curriculum. So if you teach our curriculum you are teaching to the test....which is exactly what we should be doing. However, don't beat a dead horse...if you students have shown mastery in these indicators then it is time to move on and work on others. I will put the results of my grade 4 and grade 5 spreadsheet work up shortly.