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Printing Errors Invalidate U.S. Reading Scores on International Test
Ohanian Comment: It is interesting to see who does and does not have a story about this error today.
There is no mention at the U. S. Department of Education website.
Put "PISA Reading Errors" into a search at the New York Times, and you get a 1981 story: it can take a lot of reading of complicated restrictions...taken to insure that such errors never entered T.W...Kane, president of the Pisa Brothers Travel Bureau. Put in "PISA international test" and you'll get a 2004 story.
There is nothing at the Washington Post.
Nothing in the Los Angeles Times, Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer.
If testing authorities had announced a plummet in the scores of U. S. students, how many papers do you think would have covered it? How long would it have taken our various presidential hopefuls to include it in their campaign stump speeches?
Printing Errors Invalidate U.S. Reading Scores on International Test
Education Week
Print edition:; 11/28/07; online ll/19/07
By Sean Cavanagh
Reading scores for the United States on an international assessment of student skills have been invalidated because of major errors in the printing of the test, in what a top federal education official called an "embarrassment" for government officials and the private contractor responsible for administering the exam.
The results of the reading section of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, were ruined when printing errors in the test booklets directed students to the wrong pages for information related to specific questions.
Mark S. Schneider, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the arm of the U.S. Department of Education that oversees U.S. participation in the exam, said today that his agency bore some responsibility for not catching the printing problem before the tests were given to students in fall 2006.
But he also said the primary duty for making sure the tests were printed correctly belonged to the contractor the Education Department hired to administer the test, RTI International, of Research Triangle Park, N.C. A spokesman for the contractor said the company accepted full responsibility for the mishap.
You can find the rest of the article at here.
N.C. Company Causes Error That Invalidates Reading Scores
By Nancy Zuckerbrod, AP
WRAL.com (Raleigh/Durham/Fayettesville)
11/19/07
The News and Observer (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill)
ll/20/07
Some papers don't have the story in the print edition, but do bring up the AP story when one does a search at the newspaper site.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
San Francisco Chronicle
WASHINGTON — The reading scores of U.S. students on an international test are being tossed out due to a problem with how a North Carolina company printed the test, federal officials said Monday.
Scores on the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, are due out next month. Fifteen-year-olds in more than 50 countries took the test. It focused on science this time but also included math and reading questions.
Only the reading portion is being set aside, and only for U.S. students, said Mark Schneider, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Education Department.
The problem has to do with a printing error made by North Carolina-based RTI International, the federal contractor hired to administer the U.S. version of the test.
The printing mistake made the test confusing by telling students to view the "opposite" page, though the information was not found there.
Schneider said the test was taken in the fall of last year, but the problem was not discovered until this past summer when the test results were being analyzed. That is despite the fact that a printed copy of the test had been sent to U.S. and international officials, Schneider said.
"There's a lot of shared culpability," Schneider said, calling the incident "an embarrassment."
Schneider said the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which runs the test, decided last month that the U.S. scores should be tossed out because they were invalid.
"We deeply regret that this happened," said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons. RTI project manager Patricia Green said the company has subsequently stepped-up its review of tests.
In addition, the company has reimbursed the government $500,000, Schneider said.
He added that this was the first time an error like this had resulted in invalid U.S. scores on the PISA exam or on similar international tests.
In the mid-80s, he said, the results of a national test were deemed invalid because different versions of the test were given to students. In that case, different colors and different printing styles seemed to affect scores.
Kids are increasingly taking standardized tests, and Schneider said the testing industry is stretched and in need of more people who can design and analyze exams.
However, in this case, he said the error was a simple but troubling copy-editing problem.
— Sean Cavanagh and Nancy Zuckerbrod
Education Week and Associated Press
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