UNIT 4- NORMS AND ITEM ANALYSIS

4.1 Meaning of norms, Norm-referencing and Criterion-referencing tests

It is a mutually agreed fact that our behaviour is guided by the norms of the
society we live in and we like to do the things which we think and believe that
other people will approve of. Similarly, we try to avoid those behaviours which
we think and believe that other people will disapprove of. That’s why, everybody
smiles while wishing somebody happy birth day and nobody laughs during
somebody’s funeral. We use social norms that is the socially established
behaviours, as information about what behaviour is appropriate in a given
situation.

Definitions of norms:
Sherif (1936) explained norms as the jointly negotiated rules for social behaviour,
the “customs, traditions, standards, rules, values, fashions, and all other criteria
of conduct which are standardised as a consequence of the contact of individuals”.

Granovetter (2004) defines norms in simple terms as the “shared ideas about the
proper way to behave”.

Postmes, Spears and Cihangir (2001) defined group norm as “a standard or a

rule that is accepted by members of the group as applying to themselves and
other group members, prescribing appropriate thought and behaviour within the
group”.

According to Critto (1999), “social norms are shared ways of thinking, feeling,
desiring, deciding and acting which are observable in regularly repeated
behaviours and are adopted because they are assumed to solve problems”.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of a standardized test is the provision of

norms to aid in the interpretation of individual scores.
Norms refers to the performance by defined groups on particular tests. The norms of
a test are based on the distribution of scores obtained by some defined sample of
individuals. The mean is a norm. Norms are used to give information about
performance relative to what has been observed in standard sample.

Norm-referencing
Norm-referenced tests compare a student’s performance against the performance of
their peers.
Norm-referenced measures compare a person’s knowledge or skills to the knowledge
or skills of the norm group. An individual's test performance is typically interpreted by
comparing it to the performance of a group of subjects of known demographic
characteristics (age, sex, race, etc.). This known group is called the normative sample
or norm group.
The composition of the norm group depends on the assessment. For student
assessments, the norm group is often a nationally representative sample of several
thousand students in the same grade (and sometimes, at the same point in the school
year). Norm groups may also be further narrowed by age, status, socioeconomic
level, race/ethnicity, or many other characteristics.
For e.g., suppose you develop a test for measuring examination anxiety among
college students. Then you would administer the test to normative groups of college
students. The scores of these groups will serve as a norm, suppose the average
score of this group is 19. Now suppose your friend Arvind takes the test and his score
is 24. Then the psychologist using the test might conclude that Arvind has above
average examination anxiety.

Criterion-referencing tests
Criterion-referenced tests compare a person's/student’s knowledge or skills against a
predetermined standard, cut score, performance level, or other criterion. In Criterion-
referenced tests, the performance of other student does not affect a student’s score.
With criterion-referenced tests, each person's performance is compared directly to the
standard, without considering how other students perform on the test.

If you’ve ever been to a carnival or amusement park, think about the signs that read
“You must be this tall to ride this ride!” with an arrow pointing to a specific line on a
height chart. The line indicated by the arrow functions as the criterion; the ride
operator compares each person’s height against it before allowing them to get on the
ride.
It doesn’t matter how many other people are in line or how tall or short they are;
whether or not you’re allowed to get on the ride is determined solely by your height.

Even if you’re the tallest person in line, if the top of your head doesn’t reach the line
on the height chart, you can’t ride. Here an individual’s score, and how that score is
categorized, is not affected by the performance of other students. The student’s score
and performance category (“below proficient”) do not change, regardless of whether
they are a top-performing student, in the middle, or a low-performing student.

4.2: Types of norms: Age, grade, percentile and standard-score norms

Types of Norms
Norms are something highly crucial and integral part of our life which influence almost
each and every domain of our behaviour as the backbone of our social life.
Let’s us have a look at some of the major types of norms.

Age Equivalent Scores: Some tests have normative groups for particular age
groups. Most intelligence tests are of this sort. One of the most common age related
norms is the growth charts used by pediatricians.
The age equivalent of a particular raw score is the chronological age of those children
whose mean raw score is the same as the raw score in question. The primary
advantage of age norms is that they are easily understood. However, many variables
cannot be expressed meaningfully using age norms. For example, acuity of vision
does not change during childhood. If a 20-year-old has 20-20 vision (which is normal
for a 10-year-old also) it is not meaningful to say that the 20 year-old has an age
equivalency score of 10 year old. In addition, for many factors the age norms are only
appropriate within a certain period of growth.

Grade Equivalent Scores- Grade norms or grade equivalents are often used in
educational and academic achievement tests. A grade equivalency score means that
a child's raw score is the average performance for that grade (grade equivalents may
be based on the median or mean).' Thus, a grade equivalent of 4.6 is read as fourth
grade, sixth month level. Generally, a decimal point is used in the representation of
grade scores. The advantage of grade equivalency scores is that they are easy to
understand. The disadvantages are similar to those presented for age equivalency
scores in that they are easily misinterpreted.
Since grade equivalency scores depend on the particular items placed on a test and
the particular norm group used, they are not interchangeable between tests or for
different forms which are administered to different grades.

It is a misinterpretation to say that a grade equivalent of 3.2 on the Intelligence test

means the same thing as a grade equivalent of 3.2 on the Peabody Individual
Achievement Test." Also, grade equivalency scores between subtests, even on the
same test, are not necessarily comparable.

Another problem with grade equivalency scores is that test publishers often do not
have the financial resources to do a nationwide stratified sampling of children of all
ages, grades K through 12, on a month-by-month basis.

Another problem with the use of grade equivalency scores alone is that they do not
provide information about an individual's percentile (universal interpretation). Thus, an
individual might get a higher grade equivalent on a reading test than on a
mathematics test, yet have a substantially lower percentile rank on the reading test
than on the math test.

Percentiles: A percentile rank indicates an individual child's position relative to the

standardization sample. For example, if a raw score of 33 indicates a percentile rank
of 80, it means that 80% of the group members had raw scores of 33 or less.
Conversely, a student with a score of 33 scored as well as or better than 80% of the
normative sample on the test.

The middle score in a distribution is the one that equals 50% of the scores. This
score, at the 50th percentile, is the median and describes the average performance in
a percentile distribution.' A percentile-equivalency table typically provides raw scores
and their percentile equivalents. The SPM, the Miller Assessment for Preschoolers is
an example of a test that utilizes percentiles. The scoring system for the Test of Motor
Impairment is also based on percentiles. This test is based on the percentage of
subjects in the standardization sample scoring in a comparable manner. Advantages
of percentiles are that they are easy to understand, easy to compute, and suitable to
any type of test. Therefore, they are widely adaptable and applicable. In addition, the
table of norms can always be interpreted in the same way, regardless of the nature of
the distribution of raw scores from which they are derived.

In other words, even when the distribution of scores is not normal, the interpretation
of percentile norms does not change. However, when using percentile ranks, it is
important to remember that they refer to the percentage of persons earning equal or
lower scores and not the percentage of items answered correctly.

Also, percentile ranks do not increment equally with raw score intervals. In other
words, if a change from the 50th to the 60th percentile represented an improvement
of 5 raw score points, the change from the 85th to the 95th percentile would not also
represent 5 raw score points if the scores are normally distributed.

Standard Scores - Standard scores express an individual's distance from the mean
in terms of standard deviation or variability of the distribution. As previously
described, a percentile only indicates how a specific individual's test score compares
to other examinees from the standardization sample. However, a standard score
represents in standard deviation units where an examinee's score is with reference to
the mean of the distribution of the standardization sample.
The advantages of standard scores are that they have uniform meaning from test to
test and scores can be compared between tests.

4.3: Injunctive norms, descriptive norms, consensus norms, critical norms

1. Injunctive norms: - When we are concerned about what others think we should do
or should not do in a given situation in order to either get others’ approval or to avoid
their disapproval, it is regarded as injunctive norms or also as subjective norms.
Injunctive norms are based on one’s perception of what others believe to be
appropriate behaviour.
Deutsch and Gerard (1955) remarked that individual psychological processes are
subject to social influences. They described two different types of social influences,
viz., (i) Normative social influence (ii) Informational social influence. Normative social
influence refers to an influence to conform with the positive expectations of others
and is based on our fundamental need to be accepted by others, making us follow
injunctive norms.

2. Descriptive norms: - On the other hand, informational social influence is one in

which we accept information obtained from another as evidence about the reality.,
These are descriptive norms which are concerned with individuals’ perceptions and
beliefs about the prevalence of others’ behaviour or about what others do in a specific
situation. (Deutsch and Gerard, 1955).

3. Consensus norms and critical norms: - Postmes, Spears and Cihangir (2001),
made a distinction between consensus norms and critical norms while studying the
impact of group norms on the quality of decisions taken by them.
In consensus norms, they ascribed devotion of groups to initial decisions and the
inclination to ignore disconfirming evidence in order to strongly tilt toward reaching a
consensus.
On the other hand, critical norm group members, adopting critical thought, invested
their energy in the critical examination of decision alternatives before reaching a
consensus. The researchers found that the groups with a consensus norm made
poorer decisions than the groups with critical norms. Critical norms improved the
quality of decisions, whereas consensus norms did not. This revealed the importance
of critical thinking and independence in certain group situations.

4.4: Reciprocity norms, social-responsibility norms, situational norms

Reciprocity norms - Myers (1990) discussed about the above two types of norms:
The reciprocity norm, as the name suggests, guides us to return help to those who
have helped us at the appropriate time that is when they also need help.
Social-responsibility norms- The social-responsibility norm makes us help the
needy, who deserve help even if they have never helped us when we were in need of
some type of help.

Situational norms: - Norms are also situation dependent and are known as
situational norms. For example, when you in a library, you either remain silent or do
not speak in loud voice. Instead, you whisper. Similarly, whenever one goes to
temple, he/she removes the shoes to enter the temple. He/she takes care that temple
is a sacred place and does everything, expected of him/her, to maintain its sanctity.
Thus, as is seen above, there are various types of norms. Law is always in written
format. Norms need not always be in written form. There are also verbal norms which
are nowhere written and we learn as well as teach them during the course of
interaction and in the process of socialisation.

For example, it is a written norm you usually find pasted at the railway stations and in
the trains warning people and forbidding them from taking eatable from strangers
because earlier some innocent passengers have been drugged and looted. It is
usually in verbal form that we teach the norm to our children not to talk to strangers
on road or in park or else they may get kidnapped. Regardless of the type of norm,
we all respect, follow and obey them.