Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment 8th grade, High nwea test scores?

Hey! I'm not in any advanced or excel program, really curious in what this score means and if i should qualify for any programs. Thanks!

*Spring* Reading nwea: 249
*Spring* general science: 243
*Fall* Math: 251

Welcome!

Too often, schools do not provide meaningful interpretation and context for scores. Parents and students benefit by understanding the amount of growth experienced, and suggested next steps.

There are various NWEA/MAP RIT score interpretation charts and documents found online.

• This NWEA/MAP Comprehensive Guide dated 2014, states on page 16 of 21: NWEA has done the correlation work to say, ‘If you plan to attend an Ivy League school, a good indicator is a MAP score of 249 at the end of eighth grade.
• This Normative Data PDF file dated 2015 shows 8th grade end-of-year reading norms as having a mean score of 220.1, with a standard deviation of 15.73.

As far as whether your very strong reading score would qualify you for an advanced or accelerated program, that would depend on your school. To learn what programs may be available, parents or students typically check two things:
1) your State education laws
2) your school district policies

Ideally, schools would teach each student at their zone of proximal development (ZPD) so that each student has appropriate challenge and also has academic/intellectual peers... so a student is not bored or isolated due to being ahead of most classmates.

Whether or not there is a school program to support and guide your reading, I encourage you to check reading lists and find a variety of great books which match to your interests and help you along toward future goals.

There are crowd-sourced reading lists in the Recommended Resources forum. Here is a link to the books for kids age 13+, which may be of interest.

As a strong reader, you may also wish to look into AP courses, free online courses, etc.
Feel free to ask on this forum if you would like others to recommend resources.

If you want to request that your school place you into a higher level class, this involves a type of negotiation called advocacy. Many parents engage in advocacy for their children. When a child advocates for himself/herself, this is called self-advocacy. Here is a brief roundup of resources which teach student self-advocacy.

Hopefully others will have more responses for you!

Qualifying for any type of gifted or enrichment program would depend on what your school district has to offer and what the qualification criteria are.

In many schools, including ours, testing/qualification is through more generalized assessment tests than something like a single subject in the NWEA.

Your score puts you around the 96th-97th percentile on that one area of the test. Programs qualifications are often in the 95-97 range, so it's certainly worth investigating and having discussions regarding what might be available.

Be aware that many other data points (did you also take the Math portion and score similarly? 266 would be about the same, percentile wise) and other factors go into any evaluation.

But I certainly encourage you to at least discuss with parents, teacher, school administrator to understand what might be available.

Thank you both!

My Math portion in the fall was 251, which to my understanding is somewhat decent. Spring math testing is coming up in a few days so it will be interesting on how i test on that again. My general science nwea in the spring was also 243.