What Is Map Testing?

Blog Challenge "100 posts in 100 days" Post #29

I've been posting about our experience enrolling and getting started at Epic Charter School. This post picks up from being assigned a teacher. 

First, your teacher will set up a time to meet with you. Chan's teacher always comes to our house to meet with us, and the first meeting was no different. She arrived and walked us through what we could expect and coordinated a day and time for Chandler to do map testing. 

MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) testing is a way to precisely measure student performance and growth. The way I understand it is, NWEA (Northwest Evaluation Association) created the MAP assessment and partnered with Edmentum (creators of Study Island) to offer a fully integrated solution that takes the results from the MAP testing and creates learning paths using the Study Island curriculum. 

The way it works is, at the beginning of the year, you do MAP testing and get your results. Your teacher uploads the results into Study Island where specific learning paths are automatically generated based on your scores from particular areas of the assessment. You spend the semester completing your assigned learning paths. When that semester ends, you retake the MAP assessment. The system generates a new report from both sets of MAP test data that bridges the gap between testing cycles identifying remaining skills to master before state testing.