Maybe it’s because my son has now reached my own height (which is insane). I find myself staring now and then at the doorway out of my kitchen, where all these little height marks on the doorjamb are labeled with a name and a date. I can see that year when he sprouted up a ton in the four months between his birthday and the start of the school year. And – almost too much to bear—I can see how tall he was at age 15 months.
There are some things from back then that I can’t see on the doorjamb. I can’t see just when he first spoke in full sentences, or when he first spent the night in big boy underpants. But those sure mattered a lot for how we adapted our parenting focus, while they were happening.
How do we measure these milestones, and what kinds of growth do we capture? It’s a critical question in early literacy, too.
Early Literacy in the MAP Suite
We designed our MAP Suite of assessments in early literacy to handle a parallel reality, around measuring what matters in these developmental years. You can see this reality reflected in the nature of reading standards. In most state standards, there are some “anchor” reading standards that span the entire K–12 space, that build upon each other as kids progress in facets of reading comprehension and vocabulary. Measuring those works on a continuous scale – like a doorjamb.
In the MAP Suite, the doorjamb is our RIT scale, continuous from K through 12 in Reading. The tool that makes those height marks is MAP Growth. Even before kids can read independently, they are making progress we can measure on these standards. When a teacher reads a story aloud to her students, she is still asking them to start comparing characters or noticing cause and effect relationships. With MAP Growth K-2, audio support lets us assess reading comprehension even before kids can decode words and sentences.
But state reading standards also include those shorter-lived standards, often called Foundational Skills. These include pieces that are, well, foundational while they matter, but then disappear altogether from the standards by late elementary grades.
If principals and teachers understand how to measure student growth and support students in reaching their potential and if they truly value the ability to deliver a measure that an interim assessment like MAP® Growth™ provides, then consistent data practices can become part of a school or district culture. So believes Cindy Keever, Director of Student Support at the Westfield Washington School District in Hamilton County, Indiana.
Since NWEA assessments and data practices have become an embedded, integrated system of evaluating, understanding, and educating throughout the past decade, Westfield Washington School educators feel confident about their ability to understand where students are in their learning process, no matter how their buildings, classrooms, or instructional groupings are reconfigured over time.
How did MAP Growth data come to be central to the culture of learning?
The district made a firm commitment to providing professional learning for teachers and administrators, to help all become more sophisticated users of data. To this end, they have taken all the Professional Learning (PL) workshops offered by NWEA and continue to deepen their practice. They also created buy-in for the NWEA growth model by making sure it was—and continues to be—completely visible to its entire learning community. Every student, teacher, and parent understands that MAP Growth data shows how kids are growing—and that each student knows where he or she can progress further.
What do chefs, politicians, mechanics, educators, and doctors all have in common? The answer is science and engineering. Most of us probably didn’t realize when we started Kindergarten that science and engineering would affect us every day for the rest of our lives. Science and engineering are all around us – in current events, in the food we eat, even in governmental policies. Science—and therefore, science education—is central to student’s lives, preparing them to be informed citizens, successful problem solvers, and knowledgeable consumers. If kids are to be able to pursue expanding employment opportunities in science-related fields, they must have a solid K–12 science education.
Thanks to new, multidimensional standards like the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), K-12 students have access to a high-quality science education that provides them with the skills and knowledge they need to be well-informed citizens, to be prepared for college and careers, and to thrive in modern society. Major advances have taken place in the world of science, engineering, and in our understanding of how students learn science effectively.
The foundation for the new multidimensional science standards is A Framework for K-12 Science Education (2012 NRC) that describes a vision of what it means to be well-educated in science and engineering. So far, 37 states have developed new multidimensional standards, including the 19 states, the District of Columbia, and the American Education Reaches Out (AERO) schools that have adopted the NGSS…