Cricket, our experience with our 2e ds is that achievement test scores can be erratic for different reasons. I am not familiar with MAP testing, so I can't help you with that, but fwiw, my random thoughts:
1) Our ds has had experiences where we know his scores don't reflect his knowledge, but other odd little quirky things happen related to 2e-ness. For instance, he had an extremely lower-than-expected score on one test which, we learned after that the school did not give him his accommodation of writing in the answer book, and his neuropscyh suspects he got off track following the bubbles to fill in on the answer sheet. We were told on his state testing last year that he missed answering some of the questions in the booklet because he missed the pages while thumbing through the book.
2) Timed testing is sometimes an issue for our ds, sometimes not - but when it's an issue it can be a huge issue (as in, he has had tests where he has answered every question correctly but only answered half the questions because he ran out of time).
In the cases of 1 and 2, we (or his school staff) went back and looked at answer sheets where we were able to and also talked to the test proctors to get an idea of what had happened. We questioned the scores, went back and looked etc because we knew that the scores didn't reflect what we (teachers, parents) knew about ds in terms of the academic level he was working at and academic knowledge he had at the time. So - for a 2e kid - when a test doesn't make sense, it can help to go back and look at the actual test, as well as look at things like the environment etc (was he tired, was the room noisy etc - whatever impacts your child).
Next thing - when achievement test scores are up and down and up and down, yes, I would tend to either believe the higher scores and look for test-specific things that might have impacted the lower scores as long as I didn't have any questions about how my child was performing in general in the subjects tested. However, with our 2e ds we've also had a situation where achievement scores in reading fluency have decreased over time. They were very high when he was very young and they are still much higher than average, so on the surface they don't look worrisome to a teacher. They haven't flip-flopped up and down, but instead just gradually gone down when you look at his percentile score. He also has some odd quirks associated with reading - he clearly prefers to learn via video or auditory and he has difficulty summarizing what he reads. So - there, we have test scores going down with time plus things we are seeing in real life that are puzzling re reading, so in that case, I tend to believe the test scores are relevant and we're trying to look into what's up.
polarbear
