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Performance on ITED-Q
How well do Core-Plus students perform on standardized tests like the Iowa Tests of Educational Development?
On the quantitative section of the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED-Q), Core-Plus students significantly outperformed both the nationally representative norm group and comparison students in the same school who had a traditional mathematics curriculum.
The Ability to Do Quantitative Thinking (ITED-Q or ATDQT) is the mathematical subtest of the Iowa Test of Educational Development, a nationally standardized battery of high school tests. The ITED-Q is a 40-item multiple-choice test with the primary objective of measuring students' ability to employ appropriate mathematical reasoning in situations requiring the interpretation of numerical data and charts or graphs that represent information related to business, social and political issues, medicine, and science. The ITED-Q administered in CPMP national field test schools at the beginning of Course 1 served as the pretest for all courses, so the pretest-posttest analyses for Courses 1, 2, and 3 are for one, two, and three years of mathematics instruction, respectively. For the first and second years, there was a comparison group of ninth- or tenth-grade students in traditional mathematics courses in some field-test schools with both curricula.
Results for the following three cohort groups of CPMP students were analyzed: (1) all students who completed both the Course 1 Pretest and the Course 1 Posttest, (2) all students who completed both the Course 1 Pretest and the Course 2 Posttest, and (3) all students who completed both the Course 1 Pretest and the Course 3 Posttest. Table 1 below gives median (middle) ITED-Q percentiles of the CPMP and comparison distributions.
| CPMP Students | Comparison Students | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| N | Median | N | Median | |
| Course
1 Pretest Course 1 Posttest |
2,944 2,944 |
54 62 |
527 527 |
54 55 |
| Course
1 Pretest Course 2 Posttest |
2,270 2,270 |
59 66 |
201 201 |
59 62 |
| Course
1 Pretest Course 3 Posttest |
1,457 1,457 |
65 71 |
||
The results given in Table 1 are illustrated in the following graph.
Pretest to posttest growth in percentiles indicates growth by CPMP students beyond that of the national norm group. Such increases appear consistently across the CPMP distribution for each year. For example, the median CPMP Course 1 student increased the equivalent of nearly two years in just one year's time. Allowing for pretest differences, CPMP posttest means in schools with comparison groups are significantly greater than those of the comparison students.