School is out, and if you’re like a lot of us parents, you’re still combing through piles of papers, artwork, reports, and other locker remnants that came home from school. One item you should put in the ‘Keep’ file is your child’s MAP Growth report from spring testing. The report contains scores from the MAP Growth test, called RIT scores, for each subject area tested.

You may not realize that there are things – free things! – you have access to as a parent that correlate to your child’s MAP Growth scores and make it easy for you to keep your student engaged in learning this summer. Here are three things you can do with a RIT score to help prevent the summer slide:

1. Your Reading Path – A new website, YourReadingPath.com, offers age-appropriate book recommendations based on your child’s age and MAP Growth Reading RIT score. Easily find and buy books at their level for summer reading! You can enter a RIT score range for even more results, and the site offers a variety of fiction and non-fiction choices that have been curated with young readers’ interests in mind. As an extra bonus, there is an incentive program that allows you to earn free books.
2. Khan Academy – You may already be familiar with Khan Academy®, a popular online resource that the provides free educational content. You can use your child’s MAP Growth Math score to find math exercises and lessons appropriate for his or her level. The Khan exercises are interactive problems for students with instant feedback. These NWEA documents correlate MAP Growth sub-goals and RIT ranges to Khan Academy exercises. “Sub-goals,” listed on your MAP Growth report, are more specific skills your child needs to learn to master each math standard. For instance, there is a math standard for Geometry; sub-goals under Geometry could include “practice telling if a shape has been divided into equal parts” or “compare rectangles, rhombuses, and squares.” NWEA has matched those skills to Khan Academy exercises for you, connecting the report to applicable lessons for your child.
3. College Explorer Tool – Researchers at NWEA created this cool tool that connects MAP Growth scores to ACT scores, a test taken for college admissions purposes. For kids in grades 5—9, MAP Growth scores can be used to estimate ACT score will be. Simply select their grade and the RIT score ranges from their latest test, and the tool provides a list of colleges and universities where the median ACT score of accepted and enrolled students correlates to your child’s RIT scores and college benchmarks. You can even go deeper on the college search by adding in other criteria, such as preferred locations, and the tool also provides financial information, like the annual cost of attendance. It’s never too early to think about college, right?

Read more about ways to keep your kids engaged with learning this summer in some of our past blogs here:

Use your MAP score to create a summer reading plan

Five ways to promote summer lovin’… of math!

Summer road trip – 13 car games for kids (and parents)