Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment MAP results helpful for homeschoolers?

My current Kindergartner will likely be homeschooled when this school year is over. I was thinking of having her take the NWEA MAP test for math this spring. Does this test generate a detailed report that shows which concepts the student has mastered? If all I would get is the RIT score I don't know if that would be all that helpful to us in moving forward with her math instruction. Opinions?

The thing that the MAP test seems most good at is giving a general idea of how far ahead (or behind) a student is, and to me that information was quite helpful. The information in the report is minimal. My son's report had the following categories:

Math: Numbers and operations, algebra, geometry and measurement, and probability and data

Reading: Word skills/strategies, reading comprehension, text components, think critically and analyze, and read for a variety of purposes

The performance was listed as "high" for every category, with no indication of whether it was really high, average high, or on the low side of high, and also no indication of the range of high.

The ITBS, on the other hand, has far more categories and indicates the student's performance (percent correct) as compared to the national average in each one. So, for example, when my son was in K and took the 1st grade ITBS, the report says that for phonemic awareness and decoding, he got 94% correct and the national average was 68%. That particular subscore was part of the word analysis section of the test, which had a percentile rank given.

So, what I'm trying to say is that the MAP gives minimal information on the details compared to a test like the ITBS, but unlike the ITBS, it is much easier to get a sense of how far ahead a child is working.

MAP data is useful, but I don't think you can base your math instruction on the scores, even the subscores. For math, our reports provided an overall score and five subscores, Algebra Functions, Geometry, Measurements, Statistics & Probability and Number Relations/Computation. The test for the math section is maybe an hour (probably shorter for a K student)and on the computer. A decent school district's math curriculum would be far more comprehensive as well as involve substantial writing/mini-proofing by second grade. Personally, I woulnd'nt be comfortable basing math placement on MAP scores even at the 90+ percentiles.

I think you need something that is comprehensive and list by topics/sub-topics. Aleks is pretty good in that regard. However, even there, I would not necessarily assume that mastery of all the Aleks content equates to mastery of your school's curriculum. At least for my 4th graders, the school curriculums, particularly for the GT classes, cover more than Aleks plus is very heavy on writing and explaining (mini-proffing) beginning with 2nd grade math. I would make sure than the writing/explaining parts are covered in your homeschooling in case you wanted to send her back to a brick and mortar school at some point.