My son is 10 and in the 4th grade at public school. He is gifted and has been diagnosed with written expression disorder, auditory processing disorder and a deficit in writing fluency.
My son’s school uses MAP growth testing 3x a school year for math and reading. Those are both very strong areas for my son. Because of the format of the testing, it bypasses all of his weaknesses. His MAP scores are very high.
In second grade MAP testing seemed helpful, as the school could finally have data to support his abilities and the testing helped identify him as gifted.
In 3rd and 4th grade, he has been taking a long time to take the tests. The tests are not timed, so they allow him to test as long as he needs. Sometimes this becomes 2-3 hrs of testing in one day.
I recently asked the school about how long he is taking on these tests and if there are any accommodations to make it less intense (thinking they may be able to break up the testing over a few days or start his test at a higher level).
The school got back to me telling me that the test times are excessive. That he needs to change his approach to testing. If he doesn’t know the answer, that he should guess and not take too much time to figure it out.
This is very contrary to how my son approaches learning. He self teaches a lot and he doesn’t have clear boundaries of what he knows and does not know. He tends to just be very curious and asks a lot of questions and experiments/tinkers.
It also runs contrary to our parenting for him. We encourage him to do his best and follow his interests and curiosity. We support strength areas at home… sort of like gifted homeschool enrichment.
Does anyone have a similar experience with MAP testing?
Does anyone have deeper knowledge about MAP testing and how that aligns with gifted/2e learners?
On one hand I think it’s inappropriate to have a child testing for 2-3 hrs at a time. On the other hand I’m not sure that modifying his behavior is the right solution. Is he just atypical enough that he’s testing the boundaries of the MAP testing?
I am also not sure that the school is really using the data from the MAP testing to change anything about how he is instructed, so maybe the testing is unnecessary and we should opt out. The school has identified him as gifted and their gifted program is in flux/budget cut, so he qualifies for all of the services they offer, but what those services are seem to be up in the air. A classroom teacher could use the data to customize his instruction. But, we haven’t seen this happen so far… Generally he gets regular classroom instruction, occasionally pulled out with other students who are IDed gifted. His strength areas are very high (he may not have same grade peers), paired with slow writing ability, which takes up a lot of his time.
This is such a specific question that only people who have in depth knowledge about gifted/2e can really understand - so I appreciate your input!
Last edited by millersb02; 05/11/24 05:55 AM.
