The Iowa Tests of Educational Development look beyond the specific courses schools use in developing these various competencies. The tests present a carefully selected sample of tasks that require students to apply their knowledge and skills in new situations. The current edition maintains the ITED's long history of emphasizing critical thinking skills.

In gaining an understanding of students' educational development, teachers depend on many sources of information, including class work, conferences, informal conversations, and their own examinations of how well students have mastered the course content. To these important sources, the data from the ITED add a unique and valuable perspective in the evaluation of students' achievements. Certain features of the tests and the manner in which they are constructed make their results particularly useful:

• The tests emphasize commonly held, long-term educational objectives that cut across the curriculum and stress inquiry and critical thinking skills.

• The questions are constructed with unusual care and have undergone extensive pretesting and review.

• The tests provide statistically reliable scores based on a large normative population.

The scores permit comparisons among broad areas of achievement at each testing, and they provide a basis for assessing student growth within each test area from one testing to the next. Because the test norms provide descriptive information not affected by atypical characteristics of the local school population, the faculty can view students' achievements, as can students themselves, against a background of a broad and representative student population -- a population that few teachers or students ordinarily have the opportunity to observe firsthand.

These same characteristics enhance the value of the ITED for curriculum studies. Schoolwide averages, especially when regularly obtained on all students within several different grades, document trends relatively clearly. Because the normative data for all tests are based on the same sample of schools, relative strengths and weaknesses in the local program can be discerned.

Thus, the results from the ITED can be a uniquely useful complement to other sources of information about students' educational development. Of course, a score alone is just a number, as restricted or ambiguous in meaning as a word out of context. How worthwhile the results will actually be to individual teachers depends to a large extent on their familiarity with the test content, with the meaning of the scores reported, and with the interpretations of the results that can appropriately be made.

Familiarity with the test content can be achieved in various ways. Thus, teachers and others who will be interpreting the results are encouraged to take these tests to gain a greater understanding of the skills being measured by the tests.