Can you read like a 13-year-old?
Test yourself on questions from the national test that makes headlines
First of three articles on what test scores show about the reading skills of Massachusetts and Boston children.
By Alain Jehlen
How well do BPS students read?
Media reports often say how many students are at “grade level” or are “proficient” or “basic” or “meet expectations.” But that doesn’t really make it clear what students can read and understand.
Can they read a Dick and Jane reader? Can they read War and Peace? Most are probably somewhere in between, but where?
One way to tell comes from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a national testing program that started in 1969.
Unfortunately, NAEP measures both test-taking skill and reading ability, and there’s no simple way to disentangle the two. A teacher can gauge an individual student’s reading skill much more precisely than the test. But NAEP may still be the best information available on how well large groups of American children can read.
NAEP has two big advantages over MCAS as a measure of reading skills. The first is that there are no NAEP scores for individual students or schools. NAEP only reports the scores of the nation, individual states, and some large districts (including Boston). The tests are given to representative samples of students. No student even takes the whole test.
That means nobody can criticize a teacher or punish a school for low NAEP scores — it’s not a high-stakes test. So teachers don’t feel pressure to prepare students for the specific types of questions they may encounter. They don’t teach to this test. That makes NAEP a more accurate measure of how well students can read.
The second advantage is that NAEP publishes examples of reading questions to show how it defines skill levels like “basic” and “proficient.”
What is “basic” reading ability? What is “proficient”?
NAEP uses the terms “basic,” “proficient,” and “advanced” and assigns a point score to each — 243 is the score that NAEP calls “basic” for eighth-grade reading.
To show what that means, NAEP releases questions from past tests with their point score equivalent.
If a question has a score of 243, that means a student who scored 243 on the NAEP test is likely to get the question right. By looking at a question rated 243, you can get an idea of what NEAP means by “basic.”
You can read all the released items for various grade levels and subjects here. (There’s also a link to a more detailed explanation of how the point ratings for each question are arrived at.)
Let’s look at eighth-grade reading. By eighth grade, students should have learned to read fluently. That’s fundamental to the rest of their academic learning. So how well do they read?
Boston, Massachusetts, and the nation
The most recent scores are from testing that took place in the spring of 2022, after many months of pandemic. Scores were a few points lower for most groups than in pre-pandemic 2019.
The average 2022 eighth grade reading scores in Boston were 242 for Black students and 245 for Latinx students — right around what NAEP labeled as “basic.”
White students scored higher on average (286), as did Asian students (281). NAEP’s threshold for “proficient” is 281, so the average Asian student was right at that mark.
The nationwide average score was 260, halfway between “basic” and “proficient.” For Massachusetts, the statewide average was 269. For Boston, 255.
Try answering the questions
To see what those numbers mean, we can look at the released questions that come close to matching them.
Below, there’s a question that NAEP considers a little below the “basic” level — it’s rated 241 and it was on the 2017 NAEP eighth-grade test. Most Massachusetts Black and Latinx students could get it right.
This question was based on a Turkish tale called “Five Boiled Eggs,” a fun story with a surprise ending. To read it, click here and scroll down to the question rated 241.
NAEP asked many questions about that one story. Each question had a different point rating depending on how much a student would need to understand about the story to answer it.
The question rated 241 is below.
An easier question
Here’s a question rated 219. That’s not far from the average score of BPS students with disabilities (223) and BPS English learners (216).
To read the passage this question is based on, click here and scroll down to the question rated 219. The question is:
To get that right, you don’t actually need to read the passage at all if you know the meaning of the word “favors.” But if you don’t, you might be able to figure it out from its context in the passage.
A harder question
Here’s a question near the average for BPS white and Asian students. It’s rated 283. It was on the 2013 eighth-grade NAEP test and you can find the reading passage here.
Other types of questions
For this article, we’ve only used multiple-choice questions. NAEP also releases “constructed response” questions from past tests, in which the student writes out the answer. For those, NAEP provides examples of answers that were “acceptable” and “unacceptable.”
What about “meets expectations” on the MCAS?
Massachusetts officials often bemoan the fact that less than half of our students “meet expectations.” Part two of this series looks at why that is and what it means.
