COUN 6360 Week 5 Norm Sample Critique Example

Does the Norm Group Include Someone Like Him? A Norm Sample Critique Comparing an Adult Achievement Battery's Reported Norms With a Composite Client in His Fifties Who Grew Up Speaking Spanish, Earned an Equivalency Credential and Lives in a Rural County, and Stating What Interpretations the Norms Can Support

Student Name

Walden University

COUN 6360: Assessment in Counseling and Education

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Does the Norm Group Include Someone Like Him? A Norm Sample Critique Comparing an Adult Achievement Battery's Reported Norms With a Composite Client in His Fifties Who Grew Up Speaking Spanish, Earned an Equivalency Credential and Lives in a Rural County, and Stating What Interpretations the Norms Can Support

The Client and the Question

The client is Mr. Ortega, a composite 52-year-old man referred by a workforce center for an assessment of reading and math readiness before a technical training program. He grew up speaking Spanish at home in a border county, has worked in English for about thirty years as a warehouse and then maintenance worker, left school in tenth grade and later earned a high school equivalency credential. He now lives in a rural county. The counselor is considering an adult achievement battery with national norms. The question is whether comparing his scores with that battery's norm sample would support the interpretations the workforce center needs.

The Comparison

Table 1

Norm Sample as an Illustrative Manual Reports It, Set Beside the Client

Figures are illustrative and do not describe a specific published battery. A tilde marks a cell where a comparison does not apply.

What the Comparison Shows

Two features of the norm sample fit the client poorly. First, the upper age bands are thinly populated, and Mr. Ortega's band holds only a couple of hundred examinees, so the percentile ranks for his age group rest on a small reference group. Second, his schooling history is poorly represented: the manual combines equivalency credentials with high school diplomas, so there is no way to know how adults who left school and later earned an equivalency credential perform, and his ten years of formal schooling followed by decades of work learning may differ in kind from the typical diploma path.

The language row raises a different issue. The norm sample includes English speakers without identifying those who learned English as a second language. Geisinger (1994) emphasizes that when examinees differ in language and culture from the group a test was developed for, the comparability of scores, and so the meaning of norm-referenced interpretations, has to be examined rather than assumed. Mr. Ortega has used English at work for thirty years, but much of that use was spoken and job-specific, and reading-heavy items may draw on school vocabulary he had less chance to acquire.

The age of the norms is a further, smaller concern. Whiston (2017) notes that norms become less representative as the population changes, and a twelve-year-old sample may not reflect current adults' educational histories.

Supportable Interpretations

Some interpretations remain supportable with care. His scores can describe what he can do on these tasks now, which is useful for planning training supports. A comparison of his reading and math scores with each other, within his own profile, is less affected by norm problems than a comparison with others. A criterion-referenced reading of the items he answered correctly, set against the reading demands of the training program's materials, would speak directly to readiness.

Drummond et al. (2016) recommend matching the norm group to the examinee as closely as the available norms allow and reporting any mismatch; here, the mismatch rules out some claims. Interpretations to avoid are those that place him precisely relative to adults of his age and background, such as reporting that he reads "at the 20th percentile for his age," since the norms contain too few people like him to support that precision. Any percentile ranks should be reported as approximate, with the norm limitations stated in the report.

References

Drummond, R. J., Sheperis, C. J., & Jones, K. D. (2016). Assessment procedures for counselors and helping professionals (8th ed.). Pearson.

Geisinger, K. F. (1994). Cross-cultural normative assessment: Translation and adaptation issues influencing the normative interpretation of assessment instruments. Psychological Assessment, 6(4), 304-312. https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.6.4.304

Whiston, S. C. (2017). Principles and applications of assessment in counseling (5th ed.). Cengage Learning.