MAP Scores on The Source?
I have a report that MAP scores are now on The Source. My kids don't take the MAP, so I can't check.
Can anyone confirm or refute?
Can anyone confirm or refute?
Tuesday Open Thread
The speaker list is up for the Board meeting tomorrow; not as packed as I thought with just four people on the waitlist. The majority of the speakers are speaking on high school boundaries (with several wanting to talk about Ballard High). There are only three of us speaking about the Green Dot resolution asking the City to not grant the zoning departures that Green Dot has requested. It's me, long-time watchdog, Chris Jackins, and the head of the Washington State Charter Schools Association, Patrick D'Amelio. (I knew Mr. D'Amelio when he headed the Alliance for Education and Big Brothers and Big Sisters; he's a stand-up guy.)
Comments
There is a link on the district site that includes National Average RIT scores by grade level at:
http://www.seattleschools.org/area/mapassess/index.dxml.
Does anyone know how "growth" is measured? Our school's CSIP is now based on improving "growth" by 10%.
And will the school and class level data be published in some form (like the WASL/MSP)? It would be interesting (to me) to see the range, mean and variation of scores for each grade by school and for the district as a whole.
So, did everyone hear that MAP scores are now available on the Source? You can see the score as well as "subscores" in various categories (called strands).
What was interesting to me is that the subcategories listed for my child's 1st grade scores do not overlap with the subcategories for this year. Seems to suggest that the test is *different* based on grade level.
For example, last year for reading, there are strand scores for Phonological Awareness; Phonics; Concepts of Print; Vocabulary & Word Structure; Comprehension; and Writing
But this year, the strands are Word Recognition; Reading Comprehension; Know Text Components; Think Critical & Analyze; Read: Variety of Purpose
And, this difference in what is being tested seems to have a huge impact on scores. My daughter's supposed gain in knowledge over the summer is far greater than her gain all of last school year. In fact, her score is almost absurd for her age/grade. I've been generally supportive of MAP as an in instructional guide, but I'm rethinking it if something as simple as changing the test categories results in such different scores.
What are others seeing?
11/1/10 3:35 PM
hschinske said...
Lori, the first graders take the MAP for Primary Grades, which has different categories. There's also a MAP for grades 2 through 5 and one for grades 6 and up. I don't know which ones are used in which grades in elementary APP. The MAP for Primary Grades has a pretty low ceiling, so she can probably show a much higher grade-equivalent score on the 2-5 or the 6+, whichever they're using.
The school suggested we 'practice' taking the test at home, as they did in several pre-test sessions at school. My son is a kindergartener.
For those who have opted out: How do you go about opting out of standardized tests?
What does your child do during 'prep' and test sessions?
--dubious
--
I think all you need to do is give a letter to the school saying you are opting your child out and to let you know what you might need to send with your child to do during testing.
I contacted the Source tech support about it & they promptly wrote back that it worked fine on IE-7. That's the older version--- who would have guessed that we needed to hit the compatibility button for an older version of IE to make it work?
In any case, they fixed the issue very quickly and said it should now work for everyone (it opens up now on mine, at least).
I think it's hard to take too seriously the first results of a Kindergarten student on a computerized test.
Does your kid have much experience using computers?
There can be all sorts of reasons the results could be goofy.
That said, I don't think I'd expect a K student who isn't reading to score high on this test (at least not commesurate with your kid's math scores).
I'm sure your kid is smart and has a great vocabulary, and conceptual understanding but the reading portion of MAP isn't assessing these things. It's assessing their reading skills.
I woudn't sweat it much.
We did not apply for Spectrum this year. Is this something I should feel compelled to do next year, or only if he is actually doing work at or above his level?
Confused about the whole system.
JA K-8 Mom
It's about Spectrum. I am encountering more kids their parents claim are "gifted" than a population is supposed to statistically contain. There seems to be an epidemic of giftedness among the Seattle children. I'm wondering if this is why the school district is firm w/ 85% MAP cut-offs this year...
And what is the definition of gifted anyway? I've only met a single child who really has impressed me, a 4yo who read at an adult level, played chess competitively, and was obviously precocious in his conversation & thinking processes. Otherwise, I'm wondering if most of the other kids who do well on standardized tests and are pushed into gifted curriculum are really just well-trained at tests & benefiting from early educational intervention (ie. preschool, parents who do drills or prep their kids early). And perhaps others just love to learn, even though their IQ's are more towards normal.
Obviously APP is a very advanced population, but is Spectrum really a "gifted" program? Or is just the continuation of early learning that parents initiated w/ their kid prior to the start of K? Was it created for the high-IQ population, or the smart-normal range of motivated kids?
Alternatively, I'm feeling the pressure of pushing my kid into Spectrum from other parents. Even at the K level, kids are now being differentiated b/twn Spectrum and typical curriculum. Am I a bad mother for not pushing my kid towards Spectrum or applying for CogAT? Even at the K level, is my kid going to miss the boat b/c other kids from K are now filling up the Spectrum spots? Have I doomed him to a sub-par education?
I need input from parents w/ older children in SPS, I think....
JA K-8 Mom
It's not surprising that the parents you happen to know will be somewhat similar, and gave their children a stable environment, attention, and mental stimulation, so lots of them are spectrum qualified. If the child can handle the accelerated work and doesn't end up overwhelmed or pressured to spend too much time in homework struggling to keep up it's a good thing... but students are not doomed to a life digging ditches just because they're not in spectrum in elementary school.
But let's stick with MAP here.
I've heard that kids in kindergarten are given headphones, and the MAP test is read to them, so I'm not clear how MAP tests the reading skills of these kids. Perhaps there are words on the screen they are expected to identify.
Whatever the case, I'm still troubled by the fact that apparently it's known that the MAP test is not very appropriate for K-2nd graders. SPS MAP administrators Brad Bernatek and Jessica DeBarros told some of us this earlier this year. Consequently, some districts do not administer the MAP to grade K-2.
Some of the comments here seem to support this known limitation of the MAP test for these young kids.
So why does SPS use it for them?
-- sue p.
Actually, at the K level the questions were more directed at pre-reading skills e.g. sight word recognition, what sounds words make and what letters are missing (for letter recognition). These are all things my son mastered in his first year of preschool two years ago and his K teacher says he is good at. So, I'm inclined to think the test circumstances may have more to do with the results. It wasn't until about a week before the tests that I found out they would be on the computer and we introduced him to using a mouse. We always figured there would be plenty of time for computers later and focused on expedentiary learning, playing outside, etc. Still, 18th percentile is pretty low. That's maybe what I would expect from an ELL or someone with no preschool experience. But, what do I know, this is our first experience with it.
I certainly know kids who did go to preschool and are not ELL and who scored very low on that first test. They did fine in their first year of school.
I don't think there is a lot of value in this K test. If your teacher says your kid is doing fine, that's far more useful information.
BTW norm-referenced tests are not aligned to district curriculum; they do not identify how much an individual student has learned. Norm-referenced tests are also not designed to judge instructional quality. That doesn't stop the brainiacs downtown from misusing MAP for these purposes.
I'm also guessing that her high scores are more highly reflective of the difficulty that other new K students had with the testing situation than indicative of my daughter's aptitudes (although obviously she's bright.)
I doubt they are going to revise the 85% bar at least not this year.
I've spoken to lots of parents whose kids scored above the 85% mark on the K test. I don't think there is a shortage in the district.
I would be surprised if the district showed a weird skew to low scores, but, as far as I know, the district has never published the K scores.
Anyone know if the district is planning on publishing the MAP data in the new school report cards?
And to the Anonymous poster, you should repost with a handle before your comment gets deleted.
He didn't use computers at home at all, but did a *bit* of computer games at preschool. Our older child is in APP. I don't want to push our K student in that direction if it's not the right fit for him (they are obviously two distinct people with individual traits, strengths and "areas for improvement" :)), but I was honestly surprised at the scores he got.
I suspect the format of the test may have contributed a bit--his K teacher did feel that we should nominate him for cognitive testing (albeit before the MAP tests were administered!) so I will touch base again and see what his teacher thinks about "appealing" the 85% cut-off, or just letting him continue to thrive in K, crack the literacy code over the course of the year and see if next year's fall scores tell a different story.
**AnotherKMom**
One, there is a "warm up" test online. I believe it's meant to show first timers how to mouse and click for the MAP. You could try sitting with your kid through this and see if they have the basic mechanics down for the test.
The other suggestion is to see if you can get the minutes your kid spent on the test.
Last spring our kid's result included this and it was very illumination. When my kid got a low score they also spent much less time on the test. When they did really well, they spent a crazy long time. If the time your kid spent on the test was super, super short then maybe your kid had some issues with the format or a low persistence for the tasks.
I know my Kindee told me they guessed on things that they could have easily figured out with a little effort on the first time they tried the MAP. They were worried about getting done quickly.
And just out of curiosity, if your kid got a really low score, was that reflected in all the reported "strands"? Or did your kid do ok in some and score low in others? I'm just curious how those subtests add up to the overall score. Does a student have to score low in all of them to be in the bottom percentiles or is just scoring really badly in a few enough?
There really isn't enough information for parents about the primary test. The strand scores are pretty meaningless if you don't know what sort of questions are involved in each category.
my older kids did not seem to need "ramp up" time (and 1 was just in 1st grade last yr) and have tested consistently, the K child I think will need more test-taking practice before i'll believe in her (low) scores. does anyone know where i can find more data crunching - what are the percentiles relative to her school, SPS, all MAP takers? what types of questions are within each strand? (again, "algebra" for K's?)
I did find this document that has some information.
Looks like it is a doc for teachers, and it's plucked from a google search, so I can't vouch for its validity.
It is interesting to see that things like antonyms and homonyms are covered and syllabification.
I asked my kid about the syllabification and they said they did get questions about that, but that they didn't know what a syllable is. I explained it. We'll see how much this affects their "phonics" score next time.
Turns out he somehow got entered in the system as a SECOND grader, not a K student, and his teacher has been trying to get the correction made--which puts him at the 85th percentile for math and the 65th percentile for reading. Since these tests were done so early in the year, those seem much more realistic to me. I suspect his older sibling (now in APP) would have had very similar scores at this point in the year as a kindergartener.
He's very much a beginning reader right now, but I suspect once the literacy lightbulb gets lit later this year, he will be every bit the voracious reader his older sibling is.
Our K teacher has suggested that we call the AL office and describe the issue and ask that he be considered for the cognitive test. We'll probably do that just to help inform ourselves around possibilities for differentiation, but it seems like there may be a lot of "false negatives" with the MAP tests that don't truly reflect a child's capabilities--especially a kindergartener's capabilities!
**AnotherKMom**
I don't know enough about the intricacies of the test, but I wonder how he would score if given the K version of the test, which might have started off with more appropriate questions. On the one hand, since it's an adaptive test, I guess it shouldn't matter, but could it? I wouldn't rule it out entirely.
Unfortunately, to me, it looks more like: let's make sure we keep the kids at this lower level so everyone is happy as opposed to let's let them shine.
Quite a few years ago when we were "school shopping" for kid #1, we visited many schools. Wedgwood had a terrible reputation for friction between Spectrum and regular classes, and it showed plainly even in the tours. Even though we would have easily placed into Spectrum, we opted out.
A few years later we went through some of the same process with kid #2. In the case of Wedgwood, same school, many of the same teachers, but new principal and the attitude was like night and day compared with the previous round. There was acknowledgment of the Spectrum program, and the kids were reasonably well served, but the attitude was gone. Most of the younger kids weren't even aware they were in a separate program at all. This time around, we opted in, and while no school is perfect, we did not regret our decision.
The problem is that when there's friction/jealousy among the families in the school it really messes things up for everyone, and leads to stupid solutions, like removing or diluting helpful programs like Spectrum.
Since when does a principal get to make that decision?! Spectrum is a district-defined program, and the district says it's self-contained. (Yes, I know this kind of building level override does happen, but it's not supposed to happen)
See the definition here: Advanced Learning Spectrum
3) Cluster district-identified students to form classroom rosters. District-identified students are students found eligible for the program through the district's testing process.
The younger grades take a different test from the older. Did the drop in fore coincide with this?
I found some of the anomalies in my kid's score could probably be accounted for by the amount of time spent on the test. The test records this and your teacher could probably provide it to you. That way you could rule out a lack of effort.
What does you kid's teacher say about how the scores com are to his actual progress?
Have his raw scores actually gone down or just the percentiles?