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Parents of students who took the InView cognitive ability test in addition to the Terra Nova test will receive the results of that test on a page labeled "Individual Profile with InView, Part II" What is this information and what does it mean?

The InView test is CTB/McGraw Hill's answer to the IQ test. It is supposed to provide a measure of your child's cognitive ability--basically his or her IQ--and therefore predict how your child will perform on all the other tests. The home report is impenetrable, so let's see if we can figure out what's what.

The main number you are looking for is hiding down in the lower left corner of the scores. It is labeled "CSI" which stands for Cognitive Skills Index. This number is CTB/McGraw Hill's version of the IQ. The CSI sums up what your child will be labeled for as long as these reports are floating around in our schools. The nationally normed mean score is 100. In other words, if your child's CSI is 100, he or she will be labeled average. If your child's score is much higher than 100, he or she will be labeled a whiz kid and if your child's score is much lower than 100, then he or she will be labeled… well, you get the idea. Next to the CSI is the "Range" which is supposed to indicate in what range your child would score if the test were taken a few times.

To put a finer point on it, the standard deviation of this CSI number is said to be 16. The standard deviation is a calculated statistic which tells you how tightly data is grouped or clustered around the mean or the center. In this case, the national center is 100, and most of the scores nationally fall between 84 and 116. Put another way, if your child's CSI score is lower than 84 or higher than 116, you can expect his or her new label to be tattooed to his or her forehead.

Now, if you look for the columns marked "NPA" and "NPG", you can find how your child scored on the individual cognitive areas measured as a national percentile by age and a national percentile by grade. For example, an "NPA" in Quantitative Reasoning of 34 would mean that, nationally, your child scored higher than 34 percent (and lower than 66 percent) of other test takers of the same age in this category.

We're having so much fun already, it seems only natural to jump right in and take a look at the national Stanine scale. Hold on to your hats, folks. Stanines, short for "standard nines", are scales created with nine intervals with the 5th stanine stretching over the midpoint of the total distribution of data. The 5th stanine contains twenty percent of the scores. Your child, then, would be considered average if he or she were in the 5th stanine. It's too much fun all at once, is it not?

Let's see, what were we talking about? Oh yes, our children. For those who actually put credibility in scores that were derived from brain-numbing tests filled out during the opening weeks of school by shell-shocked children, the InView test will provide a convenient resource by which to label the data-units (formerly known as children) in our classrooms. Fortunately, dear reader, many of our teachers find this data to be as absurd as you do. Many teachers in our district would not dream of using the CSI score as a way to categorize and, therefore, create self-fulfilling prophesies of our data-units, err… we mean children.

Now, there are parents who will find that their child's CSI score does not correlate in any way with what they know to be reality. Perhaps their average child who copes just fine in her classroom will score a CSI of 60, for example. Such a ridiculous score should be easy to identify as something that occurred as an extension of the testing stress that could be found in our schools at the start of the year. On the other hand, if that average child scores a CSI of 80 or 82, will someone always be around to interpret that score as a false reading for the teachers and administrators who read your child's record in grades to come? It's anyone's guess.