Making MAP More Meaningful, or Creating a Feedback Loop with Students

Making MAP More Meaningful, or Creating a Feedback Loop with Students

As a professional development facilitator, when I’m face to face with NWEA partners there are two questions I often hear:

“What is the best way to leverage MAP assessment information?” and “How can we better ensure students’ engagement in the assessment?”

One answer to both of these questions is to help students know for sure that the MAP assessment is important and meaningful. In order to achieve this, teachers can engage students in group and individual discussions about the purpose of the MAP assessment for them individually and in the classroom as a whole. Creating the feedback loop with students begins with being transparent about the desire to see learning for all students and acknowledging how all assessments provide the opportunity for the teacher to check in to see how successful she is with her teaching.

When MAP is the assessment in focus, teachers can use specific whole class and individual language to start the feedback loop that will connect students to their scores, to the learning level they achieved, and to the skills and concepts aligned to their readiness.

Here are some successful strategies for a whole-class conversation:

  1. Start with what makes MAP different. Students of all ages need to know that MAP is trying to discover their “readiness” or their “ready to learn” level. It is designed to find the place where they get about half of the questions right, so their teacher can know what students understand, and the other half the questions wrong, so their teacher can know where to begin teaching. Because this is different from many assessments students have taken in the past, it’s worth reinforcing this concept several times to help relieve anxiety and set expectations.
  2. Let students know how you will use the information for instruction, then highlight it for them when the opportunity arises.
  3. Share that you expect many of them to be ready for different skills, and that this is OK.
  4. Explain that the assessment starts with questions at the difficulty level of their score from their last time taking it, and that this is how it measures their learning growth.
  5. Remind them that the assessment is about all their knowledge and not just what they are working on right now.
  6. Ask them to share what they were thinking during the assessment.
  7. Tell them when and how you will speak with them individually about their scores (if you intend to do so).

Here are some successful strategies for a conference with an individual student.

As the expert for your grade/subject, feel free to adjust these to be developmentally appropriate for your students.

  1. Be specific. Let them know which skills and concepts they can work on right now to help them be successful in class.
  2. Share the goal area and sub-goal from the MAP Learning Continuum, as well as how you chose those skills and concepts based on their current work in class, their MAP results and what you know about them from in-class performance and other formative assessments.
  3. If they have relative strengths and weaknesses, help them understand that the assessment identified those tendencies by allowing them to perform above and below their overall score, before pinpointing their “ready to learn” level.
  4. If you are setting goals for growth, share what typical growth is and coach students to set a goal that they think is reasonable. Help them reflect on why they think it is reasonable.
  5. Create an opportunity for them to check in on their progress. When doing formative assessment that applies to the skills they are working on, provide them time to reflect on their improvement.
  6. If there is evidence that they have improved, guide them toward new skills to work on in order to advance their growth.

According to research, recognition and reinforcing effort produces a 29 percentile gain in learning.* By connecting the students’ effort on the assessment to the teacher’s desire for them to learn and improve, and by providing specific learning targets for students, the teacher can create a feedback loop that will help students be engaged in the assessment and leverage the results for student growth.

Have you used any of these strategies with your own students? Do you have other strategies you like using for helping to develop the feedback loop in the classroom? Please share in the comments!

*Classroom Instruction that Works: Research-based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement, by Robert Marzano (2001).

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