IMPLICATIONS OF CRITERION-REFERENCED MEASUREMENT

none - conceptual paper

Educational measurement generally

Foundational conceptual paper, no data, grade D. Recorded because the distinction it draws is the one an intake tool most often gets wrong, and because the paper is the reason the vocabulary exists at all.

The distinction, stated precisely. A NORM-REFERENCED measure identifies an individual's performance relative to the performance of others on the same measure; a CRITERION-REFERENCED test identifies an individual's status with respect to an established standard of performance. The paper then works out the consequences, and the consequences are what get forgotten: variability, item construction, reliability, validity, item analysis, reporting and interpretation all work DIFFERENTLY under the two frames. Most damagingly for practice, the reliability statistics that a norm-referenced test lives by depend on variance between people, so a criterion-referenced test on which everyone has mastered the content will look "unreliable" while measuring perfectly. A percentile answers "compared to whom"; it never answers "does this child know how to use an apostrophe."

Not applicable - conceptual.

Not an empirical claim; the distinction is definitional and has been standard for over fifty years.