This is our second year to do MAP testing. I'm curious as to how others feel about it. How much do you let it shape what you are doing in your classroom? How reliable do you feel this data is? Do you ever have kids whose scores go down? What do you do for those kids? How do you grow the kids who are already so high? How do you use the data in your classroom - do you let it shape your groups or is it only one thing that you take into consideration? For myself, I like the idea that we are testing the kids throughout the year to get an idea of where they are. However, some of my students scores just don't jive with what I see in the classroom. I had a few kids whose scores went down. I feel like a rotten teacher when I see that. Then I have others who are scoring way above grade level, and I'm asking myself what kinds of things I can give them to grow them. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
W ea lso were just asked to take a look at our student growth and, to be honest, after initially being relieved that they all did so well, I now am wondering what it all means? For one, I think it means whatever I'm doing must be working. That's good because I was worried I wasn't doing enough. I have one student who made no growth because he is so high...I wonder what I can do with him now to push him farther...? I only had three that make their projected growth. Two have ADHD and the other is just apathetic about school in general although very smart. It is tough to think about how to use the data.
We've been using MAP for years. I love that we get data from multiple sources (not just MAP). I use the MAP data to help me see what skills students need to be working on throughout the year. It helps me to really pinpoint where to start with students in the beginning of the year and can help to guide instruction throughout the year (though it is not the only tool). You can print out a report that states what skills students were tested on and will see on the test for each rit range in MAP. It's a nice tool to refer too throughout the year.
I honestly didn't take my scores too seriously for data purposes. My kids did extremely well and I was relieved that they "made me look good" for admin who does take the scores very seriously. The only thing I really took out of it was to see how kids would do in a high-stakes testing (it is considered high-stakes in my school- since they do non-renewals before state testing comes back, the data they look at is MAPs for how "effective" you are) situation. For example, I looked for kids who were just blowing it off, kids who were really nervous, how much stamina they had for a longer test, and what strategies I saw them using. I did look at the skill areas to see if there were any that the kids were just really weak in across the board, but there were none that were consistent.
DesCartes is wonderful! If you pull up the table that shows your students sorted by Rit range, you can click on mathematics and then on any sub area to get the skills that were tested in each range.
My kids' scores bounce all over the place. One kid will go from the 90th percentile down to the 65th, panicking the parents; another jumps from the 50th to the 91st, generating an opposite reaction. Throwing darts would be almost as accurate IMHO.
What would you do for a student whose score went down? Would you move them to a lower group if their score dropped over 5 pts or just chalk it up to a bad day as long as you didn't see any other changes in their work in the classroom? What reports do you find most useful? I like the goal projections and the class breakdown by RIT. I like DesCartes but it's a little overwhelming to me for some reason.
I base my reading groups on our Fountas/Pinnell assessments instead of MAP scores. I would just chalk it up to variance if their in-class work was fine.
You'll find a decent amount of past discussion on map testing on this forum, but my brief summary is that I think it's not incredibly useful for either instructional purposes or progress monitoring. I don't think there are enough student responses in any particular skill area for it to be diagnostic - for example, if you're assessing cause and effect, it's unlikely that there would be more than one or two items representing that skill, which is too little data to determine a strength or weakness in that area. It's also given too infrequently to be useful in a progress monitoring capacity. However, I will say it could useful for program evaluation purposes - examine average scores from groups of kids on the class, grade, building, and district levels to determine effectiveness of an instructional program. I think it'd comprehensive enough and with adequate psychometrics to support use in aggregate. However, any classroom teacher can probably tell you multiple stories of point loss, 30 point growths, etc which indicates less than adequate psychometrics for decision making on a student level.
