Assessing students under age 13

It is standard practice that normative tests are not generally recommended for use outside the age range for which they have been standardised. Any test, such as Exact, which meets basic psychometric criteria must be standardised on a given population, and this will determine the range of applicability of the test (see Section 1.4 for an explanation of the standardisation process.) Tests appropriate to the student’s chronological age should be used wherever possible, to avoid the danger of inappropriate decisions being made – e.g. that a student is ‘at risk’ (or not ‘at risk’) when the evidence for this may be unsound.

Administrators who require a test to discern a child’s reading skills should consider using NGRT (ages 6-16).