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Student Achievement Assessment

Though the school is presently in the process of changing its standardized testing strategy, for years Rancho Solano has used the Stanford Achievement Test to provide information about a student's achievement in core academic courses. The academic areas include reading vocabulary and comprehension, mathematics problem solving, and language.

As you review the summary of historical Stanford Achievement Test data represented on this page, keep in mind that there are two scores that are best able to help you understand a student's performance: percentile rank and stanine scores. Percentile ranks provide a comparison of a student's performance to that of a national sample of students in the same grade. Percentile ranks near 50 indicate that a child's performance is about average when compared to that of student's in the same grade. A percentile rank above 76 indicates that a student's performance is above average. A percentile rank below 24 indicates that a child's performance is below average. Stanine scores provide similar information. A stanine of 1,2, or 3 suggests that a child is performing below average. Stanines of 4, 5, and 6 indicate that a child is demonstrating average performance. A stanine of 7,8 or 9 indicates above average performance.

- Provided by Arizona Department of Education,
"Understanding Tests Results, Arizona Student Achievement Program" ;

For grades 1st through 12th, Rancho Solano is presently engaged in shifting from the Stanford Achievement Test to the Educational Records Bureau's CTP4 test. The ERB's CTP4 is a battery of assessments designed to provide instructionally useful information about student performance to the school and teachers in key areas of achievement: listening, reading, vocabulary, writing, and mathematics. Growing out of the admissions tests for the most elite boarding schools in the world, this norm-referenced test is used in only 10% of schools in the United States and is generally considered to be the "gold standard" in the world of high-achieving academic institutions. ERB-member schools include the leading private schools in the country as well as a select group of suburban public schools. Rancho Solano is currently working with the ERB to develop a revolutionary new way to track student testing data in a way that will allow the school to track students as individuals and determine if the school's instructional strategies are maximizing a student's unique academic potential. Additionally, this method of data tracking will be used to directly inform teachers' decisions regarding differentiated instruction within each classroom.