• NWEA MAP Growth Assessments

    EMS ISD is excited to begin administering the NWEA Measures of Academic Progress Growth, or MAP Growth, this year for all students in grades K-8 in Reading and Math. Grades 4-8 will also take the MAP Growth Science assessment. These assessments will be given once at the beginning of the school year, once in the middle of the school year, and once at the end of the school year. 

    What is a MAP Test?

    MAP is a national test that compares students to one another to see how each student learns, as we know every student learns in his or her own way. MAP measures what learners know and informs what they're ready to learn next by using a computer adaptive test that adjusts to the ability and knowledge of the learner.

    Your child's educator will use the results of the NWEA MAP Growth assessments to better understand your child's individual needs and to help him/her progress in the assessed area. Because the assessment is a growth measure, it can track the growth of the learner between testing events and over multiple years of testing. 

    What is a passing score on MAP?

    MAP is not designed as a pass or fail assessment. Instead, it is an adaptive tool used to determine what each student is ready to learn.  The assessment identifies a student's learning readiness based on their responses, adjusting the difficulty of questions accordingly. When a student answers about 50% of the questions correctly, the assessment will adapt to find the optimal level of challenge, providing either easier or harder questions based on prior answers. 

    What is a RIT Score?

    MAP employs the RIT (Rasch Unit) scale to measure and compare academic growth across all grade levels. This score indicates a student's readiness to learn, independent of their enrolled grade. By administering the assessment multiple times, we can track each student's academic progress year after year.

    What is a Percentile Rank?

    The percentile rank indicates how well a student performed in comparison to other students in the same norm group. (Norm groups are students in the same grade with the same number of instructional weeks. The most recent norm study was a group of over 2.3 million students from across the United States). A student’s percentile rank indicates, on a scale of 1-99, how the student compared to other students in the norm study. In other words, a student with a percentile rank of 72 scored as well as, or better than 72% of the students in the same grade level across the country.

    How will I know how my student performed on the MAP assessment?

    A Family Report will be shared by your student's teacher either via email, a printed copy, or during a parent-teacher conference. The report provides some basic information about MAP Growth and why your child is taking it. You will then see information for the specific assessment(s).

    SAMPLE FAMILY REPORT: English | Spanish

    For more information about MAP Growth assessments, please see the following NWEA resources: