Learning from Experience:

The TABE: Thoughts from an Inquiring Mind

Cathy Coleman
Worcester Adult Learning Center, Worcester, MA
SABES Central Resource Center, Boston, MA

A typical day in my life starts like this: I sit in a stack on the book shelf. Suddenly, I am whisked away and handed to someone who looks as startled by me as I am by them. I am a TABE (the Test of Adult Basic Education) and I have become, according to one adult education professional, the " industry standard. " Lots of people know my name. Some love me and some hate me. I guess you can't please all the people all of the time.

The TABE is a battery of multiple-choice tests. According to the publisher, the purpose of the battery is "not to test specific life skills, but to test basic skills in the context of life skills tasks" (CTB/McGraw Hill, 1987). There is a vocabulary section and a reading comprehension section, which together give a composite reading score. A locator test is available which consists of 25 multiple-choice items and 25 multiple-choice computation items ranging from whole numbers skills to decimals. The locator requires 37 minutes to administer (for both vocabulary and arithmetic sections). There are also two math sections and two writing sections.

Programs vary a great deal on which sections (or how many sections) of the TABE are given. The reading section is almost always one of the sections included.

You can't please all the people all the time. The same could be said for any type of assessment. The question for me as an adult educator and staff development person is, does this test meet my needs, the needs of my program, and the needs of my learners?

To begin to address these questions, I look at my own experience as an adult educator. I have been able to gain a fairly accurate, general idea of a learner's reading comprehension level by using the TABE. Someone might come to my class on any given day with a TABE score of 5.5, for example. This gives me an idea of where to start. It does not, however, give me an idea of which materials I might try with this learner.

Still, I have learned over the years to take that score with a rather large grain of salt. When I talk to my learners about their scores on the TABE (which they are almost always anxious to find out), I tell them that this score only gives us a ballpark figure and that we will both know better after a few weeks of working together, at which "level," for want of a better word, they are.

We also talk about the value of knowing a " level." We discuss how it can give us a general idea about how far they might be from being able to take the GED (which is very often their first, and sometimes only, stated goal).

My career in adult education had almost always involved the wearing of at least two different hats. One is that of the Practitioner Inquiry Coordinator (PIC). In my role as PIC, I work with teachers to see the worlds of our classrooms through the eyes of an anthropologist. We observe carefully. We try to answer the question: What is going on in this classroom? We try to identify and question the underlying assumptions in our teaching. Sometimes we make changes based on that.

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A counselor I spoke with told me that the TABE is the "industry standard." I asked how long the program had been using the TABE. He told me that they had been using the TABE "since 1973 when I got here."

As a teacher who had taught in a number of different programs and settings, and as a staff developer who has contact with many different teachers, I then considered the question: How is the TABE used? What is it used for?

Many programs seem to use the TABE as an initial assessment tool to determine placement in one of three (typically ABE, Pre-GED, and GED) programs. Some programs administer the TABE on a regular basis to determine movement to higher levels.

Some funders do this, too. Some mandate intervals at which the TABE must be taken. In one such case, I had several students who needed to take the TABE after every 150 hours of class time (about every two to three months). Some of these students had taken the same form of the test a few times even before they got to my class.

Some students have told me that their goal for class was to reach an eighth grade level on the TABE so that they could enter a particular job training program. In some cases, a great deal was riding on this particular test score. For these students, passing the test (meaning scoring at the eighth grade level) became their priority (understandably so). So... I learned rather quickly in my career that the TABE could sometimes make or break a student's potential career path.

A study published in 1995 by the National Center on Adult Literacy (NCAL) entitled, When Less is More: A Comparative Analysis for Placing Students in Adult Literacy Classes, concluded that, "a test as brief as the TABE locator could predict placements as well as the complete group of reading tests." The following sums up their recommendations:

"Attempts to achieve extremely high accuracy in placement should be tempered by a consideration of the small number of placement levels usually available.... Overall, it may be concluded that less testing may be more valuable to both students and adult literacy programs. Less time on testing means less cost for testing. Perhaps more importantly, learners often have distaste for and fear of standardized tests. By cutting back on testing and moving toward a self-assessment model, programs may stimulate greater motivation and satisfaction among the clients they serve."

Based on my experience, I would recommend we consider the following questions:

• When and why did we all decide that the TABE was the " industry standard"?
• Does the TABE help us find out the information we are seeking to know?
• What do we seek to know from using the TABE?
• To what extent is the TABE successful in placing students in the correct classes?
• Is there flexibility in our programs when the TABE results are not successful in placing students in the correct classes?
• Are we using the TABE in a way that is consistent with the intended purposes of the test?
• Does the TABE help learners identify needs and/or levels?

It is possible that the TABE is indeed the very best test to use to determine this kind of information. If we take an inquiry approach to this issue, however, and examine the underlying assumptions, we may discover important information that can help us all better assess the needs of our learners and our programs.

If so much is going to ride on the results of a standardized test, perhaps we should take a moment to step back and think about the purpose of a standardized test, what it can and cannot tell us and if indeed this is the most appropriate test to use. Inquiring minds want to know.

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Originally published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 10 (December 1997),
SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1997.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.