Wide Range Achievement, Assessment Example

Abstract

The Wide Range Achievement Test, Fourth Edition assesses academic achievement within four key academic areas of word reading, sentence comprehension, spelling, and math. The test has multiple grade levels, ranging from kindergarten/first grade through college/adult. The test is designed to be administered in a short time period of less than an hour (and approximately a half-hour for younger levels). The reliabilities for the WRAT-4 are excellent. The test is designed to provide brief assessments that offer fast ways of identifying learning disabilities or doing rapid comparisons between individuals.

Description of Test

The Wide Range Achievement Test, Fourth Edition (WRAT-4) has four forms and six educational levels in each of four academic levels (Schafer, 2006). These content areas are word reading, sentence comprehension, spelling, and math, with grade levels of K-1, 2-3, 4-5, 6-8, 9-12, and 13-16, with the last referring to college or adult levels. The WRAT-4 has two forms, the Blue and the Green form. The two forms permit test-retest within relatively short periods. Reliabilities for the WRAT-4 are very high, with alpha scores ranging from 0.79 to 0.98 depending on subject matter, with reading having the highest scores (Schafer, 2006). The purpose of the test is to provide a comparison between students and to determining learning disabilities (Schafer, 2006).

Development of Test

The test was developed to assess achievement in the key subject areas, of reading words, comprehending sentences, spell, and compute solutions to math problems. It is intended to be brief, and has norms at two levels, for children between 5 years and 0 months to 11 years and 11 months as the first level, and for those from age 12 to age 64 as the second level. The standard scores are noted as a mean of 100 with a standard deviation of 15, and results include percentiles and grade level assessments. These standardized scores were based on a group of more than 15,000 students, but the authors did not attempt to normalize the sample to the general U.S. population for those age groups (Schafer, 2006). The test is designed to take only a short time to administer with administration times of less than an hour for the second level and about half an hour for the first level (Breen, 1983).

Breen (1983) studied the WRAT as compared to the more established Woodstock-Johnson (WJ) achievement cluster and found generally very good and statistically significant correlations between the two, except in the arithmetic scale. The authors noted that the WRAT focused on paper and pencil computations while the WJ assessment did more with geometrical and other types of mathematical questions. For these and other reasons, the authors did not recommend that these two assessments be used interchangeably.

Assessment of Test

Although the WRAT-4 may not be as thorough an assessment of achievement as some other measures, it has the benefit of being relatively short and easier to administer for a rapid assessment of learning issues or interpersonal comparisons. The reliability alpha scores for the WRAT-4 are impressive

References

Breen, M. J. (1983). Comparing the Woodcock-Johnson achievement cluster and Wide Range Achievement Test in a learning disabled and regular education population. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 39 (1), 86-90.

Schafer, W.D. (2006). Wide Range Achievement Test Fourth Edition progress monitoring version. Mental Measurements Yearbook, 18.