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    #234074 09/30/16 01:23 PM
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    Hi, DS6 just started at a private gifted school earlier this month and they had given him map testing for math over the summer before school started and then just this week they did another assessment. We just had our first parent teacher conference and got the results. (He did not get the reading portion done on time, so I didn't get those results yet.)

    I was wondering what exactly the numbers mean and why the second test has a lower result than the first? In the summer he scored 234, but there's an * where the percentile rank column is. And then on the more recent test he scored 217, which says 99th %ile. There are no grade equivalents either, does it not work that way? I was kind of excited to get our first real placement test back and I guess I just don't really understand what it means anyway. Or how the score could go down rather than up or just staying the same. It was only about a month and a half between the two tests and I hope he hasn't gotten worse at math since starting school!

    Last edited by SaturnFan; 09/30/16 01:24 PM.
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    MAP testing isn't a placement test. Many kids have what is considered "summer slide" and the scores drop a bit. Its not that unusual. It would also depend on which version he was given. Did he take primary over the summer and 2-5 now (his score for the first test is at the ceiling of primary)

    Here is the info on the test ceilings :
    https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1nA_PlvjvwFTi5vMwRxlfmmVUJo63pfwn67ZAMHaV4oU

    Here are the RIT charts with grade and percentile:

    http://www.sowashco.org/files/department/rea/2015NormsReport_Reading.pdf

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    Also keep in mind... the test is a snap shot of one day....

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    The print out doesn't say which test he took. They did mention when I asked why the score went down that he took the first one in a room by himself and the second with his classmates, so maybe they were indicating distraction may have contributed to the drop? If he hit the ceiling on the first test there is a good chance they gave him the higher test the second time.

    I don't think summer slump is likely for DS, we started homeschool for K last year and went straight through summer right up until the week before he started 1st grade at his new school. We were halfway through 3rd grade curriculum, so I was just wondering if his scores are consistent with what we did in homeschool. I'm not much of a math teacher and I always worried I wasn't doing a very good job of it.

    They have started him on Khan academy at the 3rd grade level, but he's getting a pull out for some sort of early calculus program as well. I'm assuming the Khan academy is to cover some gaps while the calculus is to teach him something fun and interesting (fun and interesting for him anyway).

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    I wouldn't assume they gave him the 2-5 test. We fought for several years to get the switch to 6+ (topped 2-5 in spring of 3rd grade for math). We never got the switch early out of primary to 2-5 and ds topped math in the spring of kinder. He had no room to go in 1st grade.

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    There may not be much difference statistically between the two scores.

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    Take a look at page six of the transition guidance document for MAP primary vs 2-5, and you will see that, above math RIT 200, the standard error shoots way up.

    https://www.nwea.org/content/uploads/2015/01/MPG-to-MAP-Transition-Guidance-Document-JAN15.pdf

    Also, note that the survey with goals (adaptive) version of the test stops after about 50 items, so a difference of one or two careless errors can send the score up or down by quite a bit when you are already scoring in the upper extremes. (Hence the high standard error.)

    I wouldn't worry too much about the score drop. Suffice it to say he has been and currently is scoring at the meaningful ceiling of the instrument. Measurement of further growth will have to come through some other assessment.


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    So there is a MAP K-1 level, and I'm going to guess he's a smart cookie who scored high on this version the first time. The second time, they MAY have switched him to the grade 2-5 version, which contains harder questions. OR, he just encountered harder questions on the same K-1 version and got fewer right on that day. Either way, he obviously did very, very well.

    FWIW, my DS had scores similar to your DS at that age and he is now a DYS who has skipped a grade in math. I am going to guess your DS could be at least gifted, if not HG+. wink

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    This is all very interesting. I will probably ask when we get the reading results if they did the higher test the second time for math or not. The question about projected scores is also interesting. The projected spring score for DS is 229, which is like 9th grade according to info that f&esmom linked to? I can't imagine DS being at 9th grade level by spring, he will barely be 7. There must be something wonky with this test.

    Looking at the data it looks like if I use the lower score of 217 it would also put him at 99th%ile for beginning second graders and the 98th%ile for beginning third graders. It put him around the 80's for fourth 60's for fifth and 50's for 6th graders. I'm not sure how he could know as much math as the average sixth grader having only done math up to about halfway through 3rd grade! He was pretty into math last year and read Penrose books and we talked to him about math concepts he was interested in. He watched some stuff on youtube about infinities and was really into that for a while. He was crazy about graphing equations for about a week. But last I checked he can't even do long division and, while he's great at fractions, we never taught him decimals and he sometimes gets confused about the symbols for greater than and less than.

    In a funny story, they reported that when he took the test he was very concerned about getting items wrong. When they told him he was supposed to get stuff wrong so that they could find out what he still needs to know, he then got worried that if he guessed (which they told him it was OK to do) that he might guess right and they would think he knew something that he didn't actually know and it would mess up the whole test. So, if anyone here is on the committee for this test, my DS thinks you should have a skip button smile

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    If you read the MPG-to-MAP (2-5) transition document, you'll notice that NWEA does discuss very high standard errors above certain RIT scores (190 for reading, 200 for math). For example, in the data set shown, kids scoring above about 210 on reading on the MPG were posting absurd SEMs as high as 5.5, which would mean that the typical 95% confidence interval would be a range 22 points wide. This hardly seems like a reliable indicator for teacher evaluations, especially when you consider that the expected growth for a second grader is only about 14 points.

    https://www.nwea.org/content/uploads/2015/08/2015-MAP-Normative-Data-NOV15.pdf

    The high SEM alone makes this not a good repeated measure.


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