A plain-language guide to the numbers on a psychoeducational report — what they mean, how they mislead, and how to show them so families and teams actually understand. Written for school psychologists, special educators, graduate students, and anyone new to standardized scores.
Each guide is short, plain-language, and focused on one idea — what the metric is, when it helps, and the mistake it most often causes.
Standard scores, scaled scores, T-scores, z-scores, stanines, NCEs, and percentiles — what each scale means and how they convert to one another.
Read the guide →Why a 3rd grader at "GE 2.7" is usually right on track — and why grade equivalents exaggerate in both directions. Includes ready-to-use phrasing for parent conferences.
Read the guide →What the band around a score actually means — measurement error, not performance range — and why some bands are wider than others.
Read the guide →"Average," "Low Average," "Extremely Low" — labels attached to score bands, not facts about a child. Why publishers draw the lines differently.
Read the guide →Why a graph beats a table of numbers for showing where a score falls — and how a good visual makes the story of the data legible without interpreting it for you.
Read the guide →Behavior, social-emotional, and autism scores run backward from cognitive tests — high is the flag. Adaptive strengths as protective factors, and how to read rater agreement.
Read the guide →Normal curve, dot plot, box & whisker, multi-rater. When each one clarifies a profile — and when it just adds clutter.
Read the guide →Quick-reference definitions for the terms that show up on assessment reports, each linking to a fuller explanation.
Open the glossary →Standardized scores are precise, but they are not self-explanatory. A number like "Standard Score 95, 37th percentile, 90% CI 90–100" carries a lot of meaning — and it's easy to misread every part of it. Grade equivalents get taken literally. Confidence intervals get ignored. A "Low Average" label gets heard as a diagnosis.
And often the clearest way to explain a score isn’t another sentence — it’s a picture. A percentile is an abstraction; a dot sitting just left of center on a normal curve is understood instantly. A good visual doesn’t interpret the data for you — it makes the pattern legible, so the room can see what you’re describing. (More on why visuals beat tables and text →)
Most of the damage happens not in the testing, but in the explaining — in the meeting, when an abstract number turns into a story about a child. These guides are meant to help you tell that story accurately: to read the scores correctly yourself, and to present them so that parents, teachers, and teams understand what the numbers actually say.
Turn the scores you're reading about into clear, print-ready graphs — free, with nothing stored.
Open the Normal Curve Plotter Explore the tools