CHICAGO--American students will be taking nationally developed tests in reading and math by March of 1999, according to plans outlined here by Clinton Administration officials.

The tests will be voluntary, but their development has quickly moved from conjecture to reality. The request-for-proposal document has been written, it will be released in April, and contracts for the test development will be awarded in September.

Marshall "Mike" Smith, acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, told a forum at the American Educational Research Association annual meeting that the tests were an answer to what the Administration believes is a stalled standards effort across the country. Despite a lot of activity at the state level, "some of us think the standards movement has reached a plateau," Smith said. Implementation of the standards for students has proved to be difficult, and "many of the standards are lower than they ought to be."

The White House considered other options, from holding a White House Conference on standards to helping states and districts link their assessments to the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS), according to Smith. "But we settled on the tests," he said, because the public and others need a focus to help them understand the importance of standards.

Smith spoke to an audience that was both skeptical and intrigued by the idea of national student tests. To the psychomet- ricians who fear such wide-scale testing cannot be reliable, Smith said "the idea is not to have statistical precision but to have agreement on the level of performance expected of students." Some researchers commented that the public needs to know better what is expected of students; they saw the tests as a tool for achieving that understanding.

The reading test is to be administered in the fourth grade. "Students should be able to read independently at that point," said Smith. The eighth grade was chosen for the math test, he explained, because eighth-grade students must have mastered the skills needed for advanced math in high school. "If you aren't in challenging math by that time, you won't get into the college track," he said.

"We know kids can achieve at much higher levels if we give them more opportunities to learn," Smith said. An architect of the 1994 Clinton education agenda that tied Goals 2000, Title I, and School-to-Work Opportunities Act together under the banner of higher standards, Smith sees the tests as necessary to "motivate change." The purpose is not the tests themselves, but to create change that makes sure children learn to read and to do math. "The tests are meant to capture attention on what needs to be done," he said.

The tests will be linked to national standards expressed in the National Assessment for Educational Progress, which is based on samples, not on universal individual student scores. The math test also will be calibrated with the TIMSS test items in order to gauge if American students are meeting world-class standards.

According to Gary Phillips, NAEP testing expert at the department, the tests will take about 90 minutes each to administer and will include 80 percent multiple-choice items and 20 percent constructed-response items. The latter will take up about half of the testing time. Results will be released every year in forms that are understandable for parents and the public, he said.