Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment MAP Testing vs School Grades

I am a little puzzled regarding my kid in 1st grade. She is a usual cheerful 1st grader with a splattering of A's, B's and C's in her reports. But she just took her MAP test in 1st grade (After taking it once in Kindergarden). Her teacher says she is scoring at the 50% percentile for 4th Graders in both Math and Reading. Can someone explain this? I know she is no Gauss.

what does 50th percentile for 4th graders mean in terms of a 1st grader? do you know the 1st grade percentiles?

Look at the appendix of this long document. You need the Fall scores, probably for reading and math. 199 reading and 204 math are 50th for 4th.

http://www.nwea.org/sites/www.nwea.org/files/resources/NWEA_2011_RIT_Scale_Norms.pdf

She gave you the numbers for fourth grade because she's off the charts for 1st and 2nd, above average for 3rd. Congratulations - you now have useful data! Others on this board will have more advice on what to do next.

Do you have her actual scores? Hopefully you are in a school that will utilize the data and place her with kids scoring in the same RIT bands as her! What MAP tells us , is what the child already knows with a 75% accuracy rate. It is not based on a childs current grade. It is an adaptive test. If the child answers correctly, the next question becomes a bit harder. If the child answers incorrectly the score goes down.

You can check out the bands on this site
http://www.powayusd.com/projects/edtechcentral/lladder/Default.asp

The scores were 204 in math and 200 in reading. Still does not explain lack of grade correlation.

I think that letter grades for first graders are a terrible idea anyway. I wouldn't worry about what her report card says. I would worry about what the teacher tells you in conferences and notes.

Our kid's report card was remarkably average and unremarkable last year--almost all 2's (on a 3 point scale) despite the fact that he was well above grade level in all areas. At the end of the year, with his grades of 2's, they recommended him for a grade skip--the first one any of them had ever recommended, including his teacher who had 28 years of teaching experience.

Although your daughter is scoring high on MAP.. she may be in a school that has many high performers. Also, even though the over score is high, she may have fluctuations within those scores. An example.. my ds first grade math MAP is 223. His sub test scores range from (out of memory so not sure if 100% correct) 198 in geometry to 258 in computation and algebra. There are still many ways for him to make his annual growth in a first grade setting just by learning some more complex shape names and about angles.

The reading score indicates that she has likely mastered first grade reading (94th percentile/spring), but not second grade reading (76th percentile/spring). The math score indicates that she has likely mastered first grade math (98th percentile/spring) and also the first semester of second grade math (93rd percentile/winter).

Grade equivalent scores (like the fourth grade score the teacher gave you) are not informative in terms of understanding whether or not a student has mastered material.

And I don't think that grades given by a 1st grade teacher will necessarily correlate with MAP scores, since what elementary school teachers (and many middle and high school teachers as well) think is important is not necessarily what tests like the MAP are testing.

I think the comparision to the 50 percentile of any grade is not particulary useful because the average in any grade is actually very low. You should compare to the 95 percentile or above to get a real sense of how far ahead your DD is so that you can more accurately determine if she needs acceleration or enrichment.