The results of assessment, whether you're using formative cess strategies or an interim assessment like MAP® Growth™—tin empower teachers and school leaders to inform instructional decisions.

Assessing students well is central to ensuring instruction promotes disinterestedness and empowers students. To ensure you lot're assessing students well, you need to utilise the processes, tools, and information provided past assessments to accurately and fairly sympathize where students are in their learning. Just first, you must ask yourself what your goal is.

Why are you lot assessing?

The start matter to do before assessing students is ask yourself, what are you hoping to accomplish? Hither are examples of some of the questions assessments tin help you lot respond:

  • As a teacher, how can I adjust my instruction to run across students' needs? How volition I know what kind of progress they're making?
  • As a schoolhouse principal, how can I ensure that the students in my school are tracking toward key milestones? How can I offer the all-time professional development to support teachers?
  • As a commune administrator, how can I evaluate our district's programs for comeback planning? What'southward working best, and what should we stop doing?
  • As a family unit member, how practise I know my child is receiving didactics that will extend their current knowledge and skills?
  • As a student, how does my learning connect with my goals?

What to do with assessment data

One time you know your purpose, you're ready to assess. Assessments that deliver information that can be used in real fourth dimension to brand a difference in education provide priceless opportunities for teachers and schoolhouse leaders.

Here are some examples of what educators can practise with actionable assessment information:

one. Differentiate instruction by student readiness

Audio acting assessment data lets teachers know exactly where each student is compared to their classmates and peers nationwide. It allows a teacher to meet students within their zone of proximal development (ZPD), the optimal spot where didactics is most benign for each student and merely beyond their electric current level of contained capability.

MAP Growth uses a grade-independent RIT score that measures academic growth much like a yardstick might measure physical growth. Starting from this score, teachers tin begin providing tailored instruction to meet pupil needs. They can so utilize ongoing formative assessment strategies to update their agreement of student knowledge over time.

2. Set academic goals

Effective educatee goals should be both aggressive and realistic, balancing what a student tin can reasonably reach with the appetite that helps them make substantial growth.

Using tools like our MAP Growth Goal Explorer, teachers tin can place MAP Growth learning targets that are reasonable between cess periods. These conversations can help a instructor and student ready a learning path together, where short-term goals provide the incremental progress necessary for a student to hit their MAP Growth target.

Over time, students should progress to setting their own goals, focusing on the benefits of learning itself rather than competing with other students or pleasing their teachers or family members.

iii. Evaluate programs and target professional development

School and commune leaders can use data to evaluate curricula and intervention programs, inform changes in instructional practice, and target professional development. Status and growth data in NWEA assessments can assistance identify what'southward working and point to successful programs that tin exist scaled upwardly, for example. It helps answer questions like, did the students in our new math plan experience higher rates of growth than other students? Where do our teachers need to focus instructionally? What kind of professional person evolution will assist our district in targeting areas of concern?

If your teachers demand further development, our professional learning squad tin can help. We offer workshops on using MAP Growth data, responsive teaching and learning, and many other topics.

Acquire more

Using student growth information to inform didactics can be a valuable and efficient tool for driving students' academic gains. MAP Growth provides the reliable and valid data you demand to empathise where each student sits on a pathway of learning. The cess can also help you lot start a conversation with students and their families about learning that supports growth, motivation, and agency.

Run into the following to larn more:

  • "v signs of a data-informed classroom"
  • "Using assessment data to close opportunity gaps in the classroom"
  • "Assessment empowerment 101: What it is, why it matters, and how to do it"
  • "Read the latest in student goal setting guidance"
  • "3 tips for student goal setting this winter"
  • "How to build student agency in your classroom"