the teachers had all of the students set a goal for themselves on the test, and the teacher told her to set her goal for 250 because the score was already so phenomenal. (according to the teacher, 250 was the ceiling).
Nothing like setting the test ceiling as a goal to drive unhealthy perfectionism.
I'd talk to DD about looking at other ways to measure her growth in science that a multiple choice test can't capture. Even NWEA states not to rely on a single RIT score.
http://www.nwea.org/support/article/1328 Furthermore, no less than three points of data should ever be used to make important decisions.
F: Negative Expected Growth for High Achievers One of the most disturbing aspects of the precision and accuracy problems of MAP testing is that NWEA's data clearly shows that negative growth is normal for high achievers.
In this expected growth graph, we can see that growth can only be precisely measured for the lowest performing students. Decline is the norm for high scoring students.
This strongly suggests that using MAP testing actually promotes instructional methods that do more harm than good for high achieving students. This result should discourage the use of MAP testing for all above average students.
I don't agree with their conclusions but the negative growth in high achieving students does need to be taken into account.
