Blog 2: Happy Valentine's Day!

Understanding Assessment Scores: What a romantic topic to address on this glorious Valentine’s Day Thursday! I was going to attempt to carry this theme into the rest of my blog post, but I don’t think that will be possible, so I’ll now just go ahead and actually comment on the text. Last week, I was speaking to another graduate student who is actually completing his practicum and has taken the School Counseling Praxis exam. I was reassured when he said that this course prepared him well for taking the test, and I’m assuming that it is topics such as the content covered in this chapter that will be especially useful for us as practicing school counselors, and in my case, future Praxis exam test-taker. I appreciated the discussion of norm-referenced and criterion-references test scores, as I have heard these terms referenced before without really understanding what they meant. I liked the suggested questions used to evaluate the norm group detailed on page 67, as the authors state that counselors “ are obligated to evaluate the norm group and determine whether it is suitable for comparison with their client’s scores” (Drummond and Jones, 2010). It was also interesting to note that many of the assessments we’ll be studying about in this course (and perhaps learning more about during our class presentations) have varying sizes of norm groups. For instance, the Basic Achievement Skills Inventory was standardized over 2,400 students, while the Beck Depression Inventory had a normative sample of 500 students. This will be important information to include when communicating results of various inventories to students, parents, and other members of the school community. The other content in the chapter, and the discussion of z and t scores, percentiles and percentages (and the importance differences between them), quartiles, and deviations IQs brought back nightmares of the “Public Management Statistics” course I had to take a few years ago, but I certainly can understand how being familiar with this information will be critically important as a practicing school counselor, as we cannot just present raw scores without providing some context for how they were computed. I assume we’ll also garner more respect (and trust) if we actually sound like (or better yet, do actually know!) what we’re talking about when conducting, analyzing, and presenting assessment results for our students. Drummond, R., and Jones, K. Assessment Procedures for Counselors and Helping Professionals. (2010). 7th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.