CAT4 and teacher assessment levels

There is a significant and positive correlation between student’s CAT4 scores and their school performance, as measured by national tests or public examinations. The link may be assumed to exist because a lot of school activity is concerned with the application of reasoning abilities in the initial learning of curriculum content, and then building on and recombining existing knowledge as learning progresses.

During the standardisation, teachers in England and Wales were asked to provide information on students’ current teacher assessment (TA) levels in English, Maths and Science for Level X.

The strength of a relationship between two measures can be expressed with a statistic termed a correlation coefficient. This coefficient goes from 0, indicating no relationship to 1 indicating a perfect relationship.

The table below shows the correlations between the CAT4 standard age scores (SAS) and the TA levels. The mean CAT4 score is the average of the verbal, quantitative, spatial and non-verbal reasoning SAS scores. The correlation coefficients are all highly significant. The figures in bold are the highest correlations for each test outcome. The mean of the scores on all three batteries gives the highest correlations for Maths and Science. For English, the verbal battery gives a slightly higher correlation than the mean CAT4 score. Teachers reported sub- levels for English and Maths but reported whole levels for Science. The correlations with Science are slightly lower because the Science TA levels are reported as whole levels and hence do not discriminate as well.

Note: Figures in bold are the highest correlations for each outcome.