What is the standard error of measurement? Should the teachers be concerned with the standard error of measurement? Why?

The standard error of measurement provides an estimate of how much an individual's score would be expected to change on re-testing with the same or an equivalent form of the test. Based on the assumption that any test score contains an error component, the standard error of measurement is used to estimate a band or interval within which a students real score falls. The standard error of measurement scale takes into account the fact that errors can result in a person's score on any test appearing higher or lower than it really should be. In order to grade students achievement, teachers need to have some measurement results. In educational measures, abstract (academic achievement, personality and attitude) and concrete variables (mathematical scores) which cannot be perfectly defined usually involves errors (E:\standard error of measurement.pdf). Simply preparing or selecting tests and applying them do not give teachers sufficiently reliable test scores. These errors that teachers have in their scores should be taken into account when grading students academic achievements. Teachers ought to be concerned with the standard error of measurement so that a true representation of scores is obtained. For example, assuming that a student has a test score of 82, with a standard error of measurement of 4, the teacher can deduce that she/ he is 68% confident that the student's true score would be in that range (78 to 86),that is plus or minus one standard error of measurement. Alternatively, the teacher can say with 95% confidence that the student's true score lies in an interval within two standard errors of measurement of the observed score (between 74 and 90), that is, plus or minus two standard errors of measurement. The standard error of measurement is important to teachers because it alerts them to the fact that test scores are not exact and always contain some error. It is an important tool in estimating the students' true achievement level and aids in measuring the true score for any student on any assessment task (E:\Educational Leadership How Teachers Learn Unraveling Reliability.mht). The standard error of measurement helps teachers estimate the dispersion of the measurement errors when making decisions about students' scores at a certain cut-point. More importantly, the standard error of measurement shows reliability in terms of the amount of variation to be expected in individual scores. The standard error of measurement not only remains fairly constant from one group to another; it is also of crucial importance in interpreting test scores by indicating the band of error surrounding each score. Nevertheless, the standard error of measurement does not particularly work well for extremely high or low scores, for example, luck or guess work aids a student in doing well or poorly in a difficult multiple-choice exam. (Miller, et al, 1995) Assessing and grading students is an important part of teaching. To accurately estimate the true grades for students, teachers have to be concerned with the standard error of measurement which helps them explore, devise and implement procedures for the benefit of student learning and for true indications of marks from assignments, projects, quizzes

and other assessments. Teachers will understand and be able to articulate why the grades they assign are rational, justified, and a true acknowledgment of a particular assessment.