Head of School's Blogs

Measuring Academic Performance

by Bill Gerritz 27 September, 2007

September 28, 2007

The Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the International School Assessment have well served our students, teachers, and parents for a number of years. They are assessments of learning and allow us to gauge the learning of our students against others around the world. However they have not been good assessments for learning. For at least the following reasons, teachers have found them to be of limited value in planning instruction.

The arrival of results lags the testing by 2 or 3 months. By then, students have moved on. Students on the low end of the achievement range struggle with the tests and are sometimes demoralized. Students at the high end reach a ceiling that prevents us from seeing what they can really do.  The testing itself consumes considerable learning time, often the better part of week.  Finally, because students take each test every two years, it is difficult to track learning progress.

Last spring, I learned about a relatively new testing program that solves these problems by utilizing IT.  Each year about four million students in the United States take the  Measuring Academic Performance (MAP) assessment.  Each student sits at a computer and takes an adaptive test. If the student correctly answers a question, the next one is more difficult and vice versa. This means students spend most of their testing time at the correct level of difficulty. Low performing students are not frustrate. The test has no ceiling so we can better understand the capacities of our highly able students. Students receive their scores immediately and ISB the next day. The test takes 60 minutes or less per subject.

For these and a number of other reasons, MAP should serve our purposes much better than ITBS or ISA. In my opinion, the most important improvement is that we hope teachers will find the results useful in planning for learning.  If you would like more detailed information you can go to http://www.nwea.org/assessments/.

We have decided to move quickly with initial implementation. In October, one class at each grade level 3 to 10 will take the reading MAP and another the math MAP. In December and again in May, all students in these grades will take the tests. If MAP is as effective as we hope, starting next year, students will be tested three times a year. Because of its multiple advantages and because it gives us more useful norms, MAP is replacing ITBS this year. We will continue with ISA testing as before this year because it allows us to compare our students’ learning with 40 other nations. I would be interested in any reactions you have to this blog.

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Comment 3: Dulce Gomez

I couldn't agree more . I was never a fan of this kind of long term results testing. To me it did nothing for immediate improvement or planning. As sinchronicity will have it I am currently working on a presentation to be given at a school in Atlanta called RESULTS BASED INSTRUCTION or how to improve students learning planning according to assessments results. It's a smaller scale (grade levelassessments)attempt to produce immediate improvement in student learning, targetting instruction to specific goals. I implemented it in my grade level last year and results were impressive.

Comment 2: David Chojnacki @ NESA

Hey, Bill! Great comments. Coincidentally enough, I just returned from Doha where Ed hosted an NWEA-sponsored data interpretation training session for teams from the ten schools involved in our three year MAP pilot project. As we expected, everyone was very impressed with (not to mention daunted by) the quality and quantity of valuable information that we get from the assessment and the implications that it has for students, for teachers, for administrators, for schools and (of special interest to me) for NESA as an organization whose mission in to foster professional collaborations that result in increased student learning. My suspicion? This project is going to change the what we do and how we do it. Kudos on the blog and on your leadership. Cheers, David

Comment 1: Brendan

I would be very interested in hearing how the use of MAP transforms the teaching and planning that goes on in your school. I look forward to a follow up post later in the school year.

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