Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment What do these MAP Math scores imply?

DD completes 4th grade and scores 257 (99%) on spring 2-5 MAP math.

DD qualified for and completed 2 year advanced math (7th grade material) in 5th grade and due to a school policy of not moving students to the 6+ test, she scores 254 (97%) on spring 2-5 MAP math.

Do these scores show any indication that this child learned any math from 4th to 5th grade?

I was told by staff that the test should go to 270. Shouldn't taking advanced material have translated into a higher score than the previous spring? It appears to me even with the Standard Measure of Error of 3 that there was still 0 growth.

In spring of 4th grade she is ceiling the test. She had no room to show growth. You may or may not see a difference when she switches to 6plus this fall. Many kids scores drop. That being said, my son's score went up (he was switched in spring of 4th grade and is now entering 6th)

They should have given her the 6+ test.

My son had a similar issue in 4th grade between the fall and spring administrations. They gave him the 6+ test in the fall, he did prealgebra that year and got an A, and then they gave him the 2-5 test in the spring. His score went down a few points the way your daughter's did, but I know that his actual math achievement went way up.

She wasn't doing 5th grade work so you'd expect her to lose some of the specifics of 4/5/6th grade work after a year especially if it was no longer relevant to what she was learning.

There is probably some scaffolding work that they do in the 5th grade that becomes meaningless once a student advances into higher grades and no longer needs the scaffolding.

Or it could be a question around some trivial side lesson that was done "for fun" but that noone cares about or remembers after 5th grade.

Or it could be she had a little bit of luck in the last exam (guessed the correct answer on limited knowledge) compared to this.

She is so close to the ceiling that even really minor things going wrong can make results look bad. If she is doing well where she is then I would just right it off as one of the quirks of life.

These tests aren't exact/precise measurement like some piece of lab equipment. My DYS DD had a 1 point drop between the end of 4th and the end of 5th grade. She also had a 19 point jump between Winter and Spring of 4th grade. She was then up 8 by the start of 6th (over summer break) then a drop of 4 by the winter. Etc. Short story - you need more than one year of data and to look at longer-term trends and many inputs. I certainly wouldn't translate two data points from one test as an entire year of no growth.

You can use it as a data point in a broader discussion about learning plans, but it's not a waving red flag, IMHO.

I don't know if you're in a position to do so, but I'd question the policy of not giving students the 6+ test. Because we use MAP tests to help determine what a student needs to learn next, when I see a MAP score that has few/no "next steps", I switch kids to the 6+ test. It's possible that the student's percentile might drop, but I pay more attention to the RIT score than the percentile in these cases. I've also given the 2-5 to K/1 students.

I would also second what Cranberry said - you really want to be focusing on trend data rather than individual points. When students are flirting with the ceiling of the test, the odds that their score will go down on the next administration are pretty good. When this happens with my students I show parents additional data to show that their child made growth during the year. No one test should ever be the sole arbiter of whether or not growth was made.

I love the MAP test because it helps to pinpoint what a student needs. MAP scores near the ceiling (and this is more of an issue in reading than in math) are not always great indicators of growth or the lack of growth.