How to prepare my son for the MAP test? Has anyone used the MAP training software by nwea and how accurate it is? please let me know.

It's very important to tell your son that a MAP test is 'opposite day' where the smartest kids finish last. Depending on how old your son is, you might want to ask him how he would build an AI that tested achievement. See if his answer reveals that kids who know more have more questions asked of them - the point of the MAP test is that if you answer correctly, the machine will give you more and more harder questions until you answer incorrectly.

Sometimes teachers mistakenly tell kids to 'just push the 'I don't know' button' to get it over with. I think I'd warn my kid not to do that.

MAP is an overall very good test. It gets in trouble with kids who make intuitive leaps and are able to answer some of the 'harder' questions but not all of them, perhaps only because they haven't been exposed to the notation being used, but the understand enough of the concept to be able to 'guess' using logic.

I hope this helps!
Grintiy

My dd12 scored quite high on MAP tests though she said she could have done more but she got bored with it. As Grinity said, the more you know, the more the machine will ask questions...so when you are capable, the more you have to sit and answer.

Because kids are destined to be tripped at certain point to have their MAP score, so the challenge can be a bit tricky. My DS9 just finished his end of 4th grade MAP tests in school (Reading:266, Math:261). He felt good in reading, but ran into an article about philosophy and could not understand it at all. He stumbled in math on something like 0.75 * sqrt(673) and according to him, none of the answers made sense. The system then teased him with a couple of super easy questions and made him quite upset throughout the test.

From a parent point of view, I like to see the unexpected so I can tell where the limits or weaklinks are. Prep for MAP or any non-college-bound archievement tests are not appropriate to me.

I agree with Grinity, especially if your child is young. When my DD was in K, she was crying because she was still taking the test in the computer room when the rest of her class had finished and left. She felt better after I explained to her how the test worked and being last was a good thing.

Preparation - as others have said, let your child know that the more he/she gets correct, the more questions he/she will have to answer versus the normal finishing first due to knowing them all theme of regular school tests.
As for preping material, MAP type assessments are to see what your child knows at that moment without study prep.

I agree with everyone above!

I have a kindergartener now. He has done very well on the MAP tests thus far. We have had to tell him that being the last one done is good. He does get upset when everyone gets to color and he doesn't. We spoke with his teacher after winter MAP, and she lets him have the coloring sheet to do that day after the testing while the rest of the class gets a math lesson.

If your child is in K-1 (K-2 in some schools) they will likely wear headphones and have the bulk of the test read to them. Remind your child that he has to listen to this and can't just move on, as part of the question is sometimes not on the screen. My 1st grader (now 4th) was super irritated about the slowness of the voice and just started answering at one point, and made several mistakes from not listening.

1st time out with the MAP test tends to take a long time for everyone. In theory, after that it should take kids roughly the same amount of time because they have the same amount of questions after the 1st round. For example, in winter testing, my son was seated next to a 1st grader working on counting apples on the screen. My son's score is probably (guessing!) at least 40 pts higher but they had roughly the same number of questions and both finished in about 45 min.