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Growth in your state

MAP Growth and MAP Reading Fluency frequently meet the specific, rigorous criteria states set to support growth and skill mastery for every student. Use the dropdown menu to learn more about state-approved options from NWEA available in your area.

Co-creating solutions with state partners

We work alongside state leaders to develop assessment programs that are part of comprehensive systems. Our student-first solutions help our partners provide instructionally relevant information while producing trustworthy summative results for accountability purposes. We are guided by each state's unique goals with an emphasis on efficiency, coherence, utility, and opportunity.

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Co-creating solutions with state partners. We work alongside state leaders to develop assessment programs that are part of comprehensive systems.

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NWEA Professional Learning Online

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NWEA Professional Learning Community MAP Growth Space

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NWEA Professional Learning Community MAP Growth Space

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Online recorded course

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District and School Goal Setting (See workbook or learning guide)

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District and School Goal Setting (See workbook or learning guide)

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How is it possible that our students are showing good growth on the MAP test but failing to meet proficiency on our state test?

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As we come to the conclusion of Spring testing, I find myself answering more and more questions about how to interpret the percentage of students meeting or exceeding their growth projections. I've blogged a bit about this topic before, specifically around the use of this statistic for the purposes of teacher evaluation, but I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about the interpretation of this statistic.

First, some background - a student receives a growth projection after his or her first test administration that provides an estimate of what might be considered a reasonable growth expectation for that particularly student. This growth projection is based on three factors:

+ The student's grade

+ The student's starting RIT score

+ The subject in which the student was tested

So, a 5th grade student with a Fall RIT score of 200 in mathematics, for example, would have a Fall-to-Spring growth projection of 8 RIT points. Put simply, this growth projection represents our best estimate of the average or typical performance for students in the same grade, in the same subject, and with the same starting RIT score.

Notice that I bolded the words projection and estimate in the previous sentence? I did that to emphasize that these are in fact projections and not definitive benchmarks for where a student should or must be at the end of the year. This is important to keep in mind, as I'm seeing more and more that determinations about the effectiveness of teachers, grades, or schools are being based on the rate at which students are meeting or exceeding these projections. And while the projections do provide extremely useful information to teachers and schools about what constitutes reasonable growth expectations for a student to strive for over the course of the year, they don't indicate that a student has had a successful school year simply because he or she has met or exceeded that growth projection. Each student brings with him or her a unique set of challenges and strengths, and these should all be considered when interpreting a student's growth in the context of his or her growth projection (which again, represents average or typical performance).

Further, since these projections provide estimates of average performance, it is important to note that on average, not every student will meet or exceed his or her growth projection - in fact, we generally observe that approximately 50%-60% of students nationwide meet or exceed their growth projections. This is important to note as we have seen districts set learning goals for their teachers or districts that far exceed what we would typically expect to observe. For example, we've seen districts where a teacher would be considered ineffective if less than 69% of his or her students met or exceeded their growth projections. While I can appreciate having high expectations for teachers and students, such a system will, on average, result in a high percentage of teachers being rated as ineffective simply because of where the learning bar was set. This also means that if a school or district only has 50% of students meeting or exceeding their growth projections, this shouldn't be viewed as poor performance - instead, this should be viewed as the students in a school or district showing growth consistent with what we would likely expect to observe. So, as your school year winds down, keep this information in mind as you begin to interpret the percentage of students meeting or exceeding their growth projections, and what that means for your classroom, school, or district.

Still have questions? Leave me a comment below, and I'll make sure to get it answered. For those of you in the final days or weeks of your school year, good luck, and happy end of the year!

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Interpreting the Percentage of Students Meeting or Exceeding Their Growth Projections

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As we come to the conclusion of Spring testing, I find myself answering more and more questions about how to interpret the percentage of students meeting or exceeding their growth projections. I've blogged a bit about this topic before, specifically around the use of this statistic for the purposes of teacher evaluation, but I wanted to spend a bit of time talking about the interpretation of this statistic.

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We often get questions about whether a student's growth is "good" or not. Unfortunately, it's a question we at NWEA just can't answer. Only you can.

I don't want you to think we are avoiding some responsibility. The problem with this question is that what is "good" or "bad" is purely a value judgment. It's an indication of the expectations your organization has for itself. What is appropriate for us to do, and we do it better all the time, is to provide some context around the data to support you coming to your own answer.

One of the most important contexts we provide is national normative data. We look back and gather information on already demonstrated student achievement and growth. From history, we create a variety of descriptive information about what students actually did. We provide percentiles for their achievement. We describe what typical growth was for a student at a given starting RIT score in a subject in a grade. Since we see wide variations in the student achievement and growth, we provide the average achievement levels for various grades along with measures of how they are distributed. All this provides a context for your students by comparing them to students across the county.

Our recent study on college readiness provides another context by determining how RIT scores relate to benchmarks set by ACT Inc. on a number of their assessments. Depending on the grade, subject, and ACT assessment, the NWEA percentiles that correspond to meeting various ACT benchmarks vary from the 43rd to the 83rd percentile (see Figure 1).

Knowing how important proficiency is to NCLB and, therefore, you, we provide projected performance on state assessments through our state alignment studies (see the Figure below for a comparison of proficiency cut scores across various states).

One trick to understanding all of this is to remember that the RIT scale never changes. Normative data does. When we look back a few years from now and calculate new normative information it will reflect what our education system and students did over the past few years. As we continue to improve, whether as a result of the changes in instruction necessitated by the Common Core or just because we are getting better at our craft all the time, there will be some changes. I believe that over time a RIT score that today corresponds to college readiness and is at the 77th percentile will eventually become merely average. When that happens, what will you think is "good"?

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What is good academic growth is a question we cannot answer, but we can provide some guidance. Read our blog post for some thoughts.

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In NWEA's norms, about what percentage of students who take MAP assessments typically meet their school year growth goals?
This is a tough question to answer, since it's not something that we specifically report or rank within our current school norms. Each student's growth goal is simply the mean (or average) normative growth, which considers a student's enrolled grade, initial achievement level, and the number of weeks of instruction received. Even within the same grade within a single school, one student's growth goal may be larger than another's, depending on their initial achievement levels. Consequently, it can be misleading to simply report and aggregate the percentages of students meeting growth targets without considering all the variables that give rise to different growth goals.

Each student's growth goal (i.e., average normative growth) is described by a bell curve with a specific mean and standard deviation. For example, Student X may have a normative growth distribution with a mean of 8 and a standard deviation of 4. If that student made 8 points of growth, he/she would be right at the center of the distribution. In the most general sense, about 50% of students show growth that is greater than mean normative growth, and about 50% show less than mean normative growth, as implied in the bell curve figure above. So in a general sense, one could reasonably expect that about 50% of students should meet their growth goals.

Similar bell curve distributions describe school (or, more accurately, grade level) normative growth on MAP assessments. Such growth distributions depend on the grade, subject, average starting achievement (i.e., average starting RIT score for the group), and number of weeks of instruction received. When school (grade level) growth is described by a normal distribution, generally about 50% of the group will exceed mean growth and about 50% will fall below that goal.

What our school growth norms do not do is to account for specific demographic compositions within a school. NWEA school norms are based on a representative sampling of schools from across the country, and so our school norms will be appropriate for schools whose racial demographics parallel the racial distributions of the U.S. student population. For school settings that vary greatly from national U.S. distributions, we may also be able to create custom tailored sets of growth norms for specific school settings by creating Virtual Comparison Groups (or VCGs) that match students to other similar students across the country in comparable school settings. The observed growth of the virtual comparison group is then used to estimate a normative growth distribution for that student. Using this approach, the percentages of students whose growth meet/exceed their growth goals still hover around 50%, but these growth goals are tailored to more precisely resemble the specific school setting attended by the students.

NWEA is happy to offer technical resources and guidelines and to work with our partner school districts to establish reasonable student and school level growth goals based on NWEA student and school norms.

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Partner Questions of the Month: What Percentage of Students Meet their Growth Targets?

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In NWEA's norms, about what percentage of students who take MAP assessments typically meet their school year growth goals?

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The education blog

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Teach. Learn. Grow. | Voices of educators and experts

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A blog covering classroom tips, early learning, literacy, assessment, equity, SEL, and more.

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NWEA Blueprints (previously known as goal structures) connect standards to reporting instructional areas and instructional sub areas of a MAP Growth test.Using instructional areas, the concepts in Teacher Reports can be directly connected to each state or agency's academic standards.

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Normative Data & RIT Scores

The most accurate norms

Today's kids are vastly different than those in school ten years ago, so NWEA™ conducts norming studies frequently-three to five years-ensuring that the comparisons reflect current standards and demographics. And we continually refine our best-in-class research model to make NWEA norms more accurate than any other-and always improving.

Norms help teachers teach and leaders lead

Norms help you see if students are growing at an expected pace, regardless of where a student started. NWEA norms allow you to make predictions about what kind of growth is typical and atypical.
Download Report

Student-level achievement norms

Help you see your students' percentile rankings in a nationally representative student population.

Student-level growth norms

Allow you to compare your students' growth with that of their academic peers.

How long is a MAP Growth test?

Tests are not timed, and students may take as much time as they need to complete them (this eliminates some of the pressure and anxiety students may feel about taking tests). Most students take less than an hour to complete a MAP Growth test. MAP Growth K-2 tests are typically shorter.

School-level norms

Provide a context for comparing grade level achievement and growth in a single school relative to other schools across the nation. MAP Growth is the only interim assessment that provides school-level norms, helping you compare specific grade levels in your schools to students in the same grade across the nation.

MAP® Growth™ measures student performance with our RIT scale-the most stable, mature scale in the industry. Like centimeters on a ruler, it measures in equal intervals, regardless of a student's grade or performance-and it remains stable over time. This gives you an accurate measure of student performance, regardless of whether they're performing on, above, or below grade level.

Teachers use a student's RIT score to:

zoom in on a student's missing skills with MAP® Skills™

connect to instructional resources aligned to student RIT scores

track longitudinal growth over a student's entire career

group students for differentiated instruction based on RIT score ranges

inform lesson planning based on what instructional areas student RIT scores reveal them to be ready to learn

set growth goals with students

Students know exactly what their goal is. You'll have a kid run up and say 'I hit my goal!' They're into it. They understand it and they know they're getting better. Dean Cunningham, Principal, Nenahnezad Community Schools, NM

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NWEA Normative Data & RIT Scores, Explained

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Normative Data & RIT Scores Today's kids are vastly different than those in school ten years ago, so NWEA™ conducts norming studies frequently-three to five years-ensuring that the comparisons reflect current standards and demographics. And we continually refine our best-in-class research model to make NWEA norms more accurate than any other-and always improving.

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