A Practitioner's Guide to Functional Level Testing.

Procedures for conducting functional level testing have been available for use by practitioners for some time. However, the Title I Evaluation and Reporting System (TIERS), developed in response to the educational amendments of 1974 to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), has provided the impetus for widespread adoption of this testing practice. The following policy strongly implies its usage: All project evaluations should use measures of educational performance appropriate to the curriculum and to the students served. Such appropriateness is defined in terms of: (1) reliability and validity (the content of the test should reflect the content of the project's instruction, and the pretest and posttest should measure the same abilities); and (2) difficulty level (the relationship between the difficulty level of the test and the functional or performance level of the students should be considered). There are four major objectives to this document. They are to present several general concepts which relate to the practice of functional level testing, discuss conditions under which functional level testing is appropriate, present the basis of the controversy for and against the practice of functional level testing, and describe procedures for conducting functional level testing and converting test scores to in-level normed scores. (Author/GK)