A study of scores made on two cooperative Inter-American tests by high school students in Puerto Rico

In 1943 the American Council on Education printed a preliminary edition of the series of the "Inter-American Tests." Those tests were constructed as part of a study of the teaching of English in Puerto Rico and contained, for each test in the series, forms parallel in English and in Spanish for the primary, intermediate, and advanced levels. Revised and published a few years later by the Educational Testing Services as the "Cooperative Inter-American Tests," some of them are being administered to Puerto Rican students in schools all over the Island. Raw scores obtained on two of these tests, the General Ability and the Reading Tests, Form A3, Advanced, by students in thirteen public high schools in Puerto Rico were tabulated separately by school and grade. These distributions of scores were provided for this study by Doctor Pablo Roca, of the Department of Education of Puerto Rico, and were arranged in larger tables as the basic data for this study. The purpose of the present study was to establish tentative grade and percentile norms for the two tests for Grades 10, 11, and 12 for students in both "large" and "small" high schools. Grade norms were derived by computing means, medians, and standard deviations for the distributions of raw scores on the General Ability and the Reading Tests which appear in Tables II-VII, along with the mentioned statistical measures. The tables include distributions for each of the thirteen schools, with combined distributions for "Large," "Small," and "Total" Schools, with separate tables for each test and grade. It was found that, in general, mean and median values on both tests and in every grade are higher for "Large" Schools than for "Small" ones. There are no wide divergencies between the means and medians computed for each distribution. The scores on the two tests are rather normally distributed, and do not tend to "pile-up" at either end of the distributions. The tests seem to discriminate well for the different groups included in this study. In general, raw score grade norms are higher for the next higher grade. Percentile norms were derived by obtaining raw score equivalents for several percentile values and are presented in Tables VIII and IX. Table VIII contains percentile norms ofr the General Ability Test, for "Large," "Small," and "Total" Schools for Grades 10, 11, and 12; Table XX contains norms for the Reading Test and is presented in the same manner. By inspecting these tables it was found that in "Large" Schools, Grades 10, 11, and 12, raw score equivalents for the various percentile values are higher than in "Small" Schools. There are specific differences in the percentile norms according to school grade, as can be seen from inspection of the tables. The highest raw score equivalents for certain percentile values are found in most cases in Grade 12, and those for Grade 11 are usually highr than those for Grade 10. The grade and percentile norms derived in this study may be used in Puerto Rico to interpret scores obtained on the General Ability and the Reading Tests, Form A3, Advanced, by students in high schools on the Island.