Hi, DS6 just started at a private gifted school earlier this month and they had given him map testing for math over the summer before school started and then just this week they did another assessment. We just had our first parent teacher conference and got the results. (He did not get the reading portion done on time, so I didn't get those results yet.)

I was wondering what exactly the numbers mean and why the second test has a lower result than the first? In the summer he scored 234, but there's an * where the percentile rank column is. And then on the more recent test he scored 217, which says 99th %ile. There are no grade equivalents either, does it not work that way? I was kind of excited to get our first real placement test back and I guess I just don't really understand what it means anyway. Or how the score could go down rather than up or just staying the same. It was only about a month and a half between the two tests and I hope he hasn't gotten worse at math since starting school!

MAP testing isn't a placement test. Many kids have what is considered "summer slide" and the scores drop a bit. Its not that unusual. It would also depend on which version he was given. Did he take primary over the summer and 2-5 now (his score for the first test is at the ceiling of primary)

Here is the info on the test ceilings :
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1nA_PlvjvwFTi5vMwRxlfmmVUJo63pfwn67ZAMHaV4oU

Here are the RIT charts with grade and percentile:

http://www.sowashco.org/files/department/rea/2015NormsReport_Reading.pdf

Also keep in mind... the test is a snap shot of one day....

The print out doesn't say which test he took. They did mention when I asked why the score went down that he took the first one in a room by himself and the second with his classmates, so maybe they were indicating distraction may have contributed to the drop? If he hit the ceiling on the first test there is a good chance they gave him the higher test the second time.

I don't think summer slump is likely for DS, we started homeschool for K last year and went straight through summer right up until the week before he started 1st grade at his new school. We were halfway through 3rd grade curriculum, so I was just wondering if his scores are consistent with what we did in homeschool. I'm not much of a math teacher and I always worried I wasn't doing a very good job of it.

They have started him on Khan academy at the 3rd grade level, but he's getting a pull out for some sort of early calculus program as well. I'm assuming the Khan academy is to cover some gaps while the calculus is to teach him something fun and interesting (fun and interesting for him anyway).

I wouldn't assume they gave him the 2-5 test. We fought for several years to get the switch to 6+ (topped 2-5 in spring of 3rd grade for math). We never got the switch early out of primary to 2-5 and ds topped math in the spring of kinder. He had no room to go in 1st grade.

There may not be much difference statistically between the two scores.

Take a look at page six of the transition guidance document for MAP primary vs 2-5, and you will see that, above math RIT 200, the standard error shoots way up.

https://www.nwea.org/content/uploads/2015/01/MPG-to-MAP-Transition-Guidance-Document-JAN15.pdf

Also, note that the survey with goals (adaptive) version of the test stops after about 50 items, so a difference of one or two careless errors can send the score up or down by quite a bit when you are already scoring in the upper extremes. (Hence the high standard error.)

I wouldn't worry too much about the score drop. Suffice it to say he has been and currently is scoring at the meaningful ceiling of the instrument. Measurement of further growth will have to come through some other assessment.

So there is a MAP K-1 level, and I'm going to guess he's a smart cookie who scored high on this version the first time. The second time, they MAY have switched him to the grade 2-5 version, which contains harder questions. OR, he just encountered harder questions on the same K-1 version and got fewer right on that day. Either way, he obviously did very, very well.

FWIW, my DS had scores similar to your DS at that age and he is now a DYS who has skipped a grade in math. I am going to guess your DS could be at least gifted, if not HG+.

This is all very interesting. I will probably ask when we get the reading results if they did the higher test the second time for math or not. The question about projected scores is also interesting. The projected spring score for DS is 229, which is like 9th grade according to info that f&esmom linked to? I can't imagine DS being at 9th grade level by spring, he will barely be 7. There must be something wonky with this test.

Looking at the data it looks like if I use the lower score of 217 it would also put him at 99th%ile for beginning second graders and the 98th%ile for beginning third graders. It put him around the 80's for fourth 60's for fifth and 50's for 6th graders. I'm not sure how he could know as much math as the average sixth grader having only done math up to about halfway through 3rd grade! He was pretty into math last year and read Penrose books and we talked to him about math concepts he was interested in. He watched some stuff on youtube about infinities and was really into that for a while. He was crazy about graphing equations for about a week. But last I checked he can't even do long division and, while he's great at fractions, we never taught him decimals and he sometimes gets confused about the symbols for greater than and less than.

In a funny story, they reported that when he took the test he was very concerned about getting items wrong. When they told him he was supposed to get stuff wrong so that they could find out what he still needs to know, he then got worried that if he guessed (which they told him it was OK to do) that he might guess right and they would think he knew something that he didn't actually know and it would mess up the whole test. So, if anyone here is on the committee for this test, my DS thinks you should have a skip button

If you read the MPG-to-MAP (2-5) transition document, you'll notice that NWEA does discuss very high standard errors above certain RIT scores (190 for reading, 200 for math). For example, in the data set shown, kids scoring above about 210 on reading on the MPG were posting absurd SEMs as high as 5.5, which would mean that the typical 95% confidence interval would be a range 22 points wide. This hardly seems like a reliable indicator for teacher evaluations, especially when you consider that the expected growth for a second grader is only about 14 points.

https://www.nwea.org/content/uploads/2015/08/2015-MAP-Normative-Data-NOV15.pdf

The high SEM alone makes this not a good repeated measure.

I also noticed when reading the document that they recommend that 1st graders continue with the MPG math test even if they score over 200, but they can be moved up to the MAP if they score highly on the reading test. I wonder why that is?

The transition document notes that reading development occurs more naturalistically: once a child is able to read proficiently, additional growth in comprehension and vocabulary takes place organically, through exposure to increasingly sophisticated text (often self-selected). There is no real qualitative difference between first grade reading instruction and third grade reading for a fluent reader. This continuity in content makes comparisons between the MPG and the 2-5 closer in reading.

From the transition document:

"We recommend that all first graders take MPG Mathematics, because they are not likely to have been introduced to a large portion of the content in the grades 2 – 5 Mathematics assessment."

Mathematics is more reliant on instruction and grade-specific content. The MAP MPG (K-2) does not include content from upper grades, so scoring very highly on the MPG simply means that a child performed as well as a child in a higher grade would have on primary grades material. It tells you nothing about how that child would do on fifth grade material (for example), because there was none on the test. The advisory states that a high score can be an indication that a child should be moved up only if they have also received instruction in higher grade content in mathematics. NWEA makes the assumption that leaving kindergarten students are extremely unlikely to have been exposed to grade 2 mathematics content. If you can make a case that your first grader has, then there this no obvious reason why a first grader scoring above 200 on the math MPG should not immediately be moved to the MAP 2-5.

I don't know much about this so my comments are speculative but I'm wondering if the lack of percentile on the summer test has something to to do with how they were normed. NWEA has very strict testing windows so they can compare all the kids nationally during a snapshot in time. Is it possible they didn't have enough data in this year's summer sample for that age group?

Another question is whether your child took the survey with goals on both tests or is it possible he took the survey in he first sitting and the survey with goals in the second sitting? Could that explain the difference in the scores?

The above comment is read what makes most sense to me. It's very important to nwea that they look at the semester as well as weeks of instruction. I haven't even seen summer norms.

Hi all, update on here. DS just finished his math MAP today and I was told he got a 230, pretty much the same as the first time. But this time DS told me about some of the questions and based on what he told me I'm pretty sure he didn't take the youngest test. He had trouble with one question that included exponents because he didn't know what a number to the power of 1 meant. He also said the test included fractions, decimals, and percents and specifically asked to learn to divide fractions because it was on the test and he doesn't know how to do it yet. There were some word problems he was confused about too. Overall he has been testing for days for an hour or so at a time and I was told he spent up to 20 minutes on some questions, so I'm guessing they were pretty challenging (he also is afraid to answer them wrong and has a very hard time with just guessing).

So, any idea which version of the test this was? Should I ask them to use the next test up at the parent teacher conference we have coming up? I know he had some growth over the past 6 months as he loves math and has learned quite a bit at home and hopefully school has taught him something as well. It seems pointless to me to keep giving him a test where he keeps scoring the same number regardless of actual progress. This time he completed the reading portion for the first time, but I don't get the results until the meeting. I'm really curious how he did as I have been worried about his reading lately.

Can you ask the school which MAP test they gave to your DS? I've done that when my DS took the MAP test in first grade because I had some questions on the scoring and acceleration based on the score. They told me it was the MAP K-1. They start to use the higher MAP test in 2nd grade.

That sounds very odd. The test normally should take an hour total. If it really took days for an hour at at a time that was a huge chunk of class time. Given that he didn't know all the material on top of that I definitely not go asking for the higher version of the MAP i.e. 6+.

The question I would be asking myself in your shoes was whether this is consistent with his performance elsewhere i.e. is this abnormal processing speed or a sign of something worth looking into.

Full confession: I started opting our kids out of MAP after 1st grade and have been perfectly happy ever since. If he's learning at home, I would trust your own judgement of progress. If very easy to interleave short formative assessments into learning activities that will produce a much more accurate picture of progress than any standardized test can produce.

I think it would be a good idea to tell him that if he can't figure out a question within a few minutes, move onto the next one. My daughter takes forever with these tests too and I have told the school to cancel the test if it's stressing her out or if she is taking too long.

It sounds like he's suffering from Analysis Paralysis, and going over questions too many times trying to figure out how to get one of the answers in the multiple choices. Tell him if he doesn't understand the question or hasn't learned the concept yet, guess and move on. The goal should be to figure out what he knows, and if he's getting some right by eliminating obviously wrong choices and then just getting lucky, the test isn't really measuring what he knows.

He's actually worried he will guess right when he doesn't know the answer because we told him the test is supposed to show what he doesn't know. So he figures that if he guesses and gets it right that means he is somehow cheating and/or messing up the test and he hates cheating/messing things up.

I know that he is solidly at mid 4th grade for mastered curriculum and beyond that in some areas like geometry and calculus (because the school is giving him pull out calculus, not because I'm teaching that). I'd say he has some areas where he is easily at 6th grade level and he has a great interest in and understanding of theoretical math ideas.

I'm mostly just wondering if I should ask if he can skip these tests or move to a higher test, and whether they are actually showing anything useful. DS is slow at everything in life and he misses a lot of class time just to take a test that shows no/negative growth since summer and I'm kinda wondering what the point is. It's not like I don't have a good idea where he is at. The school obviously knows he is really far ahead or they wouldn't be giving him a math pull out from a gifted class to do calculus with the math specialist.

Based on what everyone has said so far I'm leaning towards asking the school to allow him to skip the math portion and just take the reading test. I'm assuming that test will show useful results vs this one for DS.

It took us 2 years to get the school to move DS from MAP 2-5 to 6+.The reality was he should have been moved from PMAP in 1st grade to the 2-5. His 1st grade scores were in the 230's. In 2nd grade he started the 2-5 test. He started to take the 6+ in winter of 4th grade. At that point his math score was in the mid 250's.

He is now in 5th grade and we finally have a small math accommodation beyond the normal acceleration out district completes (7th grade algebra and 8th grade geometry). He is now taking online math and was placed in algebra I with 24% mastery before starting the lessons. He is finally happy about math!

OK, finally got the results printed out. Not sure this will be at all useful for advocating for a reading assessment though!

He got 207 on reading with the lowest area being foundational skills at 192-202 and the highest being writing and language at 211-221. Reading was right in the middle at 200-210. For this test he took the primary version, the math was the 2-5. Maybe they will move him up on the reading test as well next time?

It looks like this puts him in the 99th %ile for 1st grade which I didn't expect based on his slow and often choppy reading. Also the teacher reports about his lower comprehension and his trouble with written output. Maybe I shouldn't share these results with the district when I request the testing? Or should I just accept that he is doing well enough and doesn't need testing at all? I filled out and sent in all of the paperwork from the district last week but haven't heard back yet. Now I feel a little foolish for my concerns.

OTOH the lexile range on the results says 627-777 and IRL DS is just not reading at that level. He is mostly reading 1st and 2nd grade stuff. He can read higher level stuff, but not fluently. He has been reading the first book of Spiderwick Chronicles for about 2 weeks. The books say 7+ on them, so I'm assuming the reading level is about 2nd grade. He reads a chapter on the way to school each am, but often doesn't even get one chapter done (15 minute drive). He reads much better at 1st grade stuff like MTH and Kingdom of Wrenly. Yesterday he saw the word quixotic on a feelings chart and pronounced it perfectly (and I'm pretty much 100% he has never seen or heard that word before), but he mispronounces Mallory every time in the book he's currently reading no matter how many times I correct him (male-or-ree).

Any thoughts? Any possibility he could still have a disability even at the 99th %ile in reading? And if so, what would be the most likely culprit?