4.19.18 Making Assessment More Meaningful with Norms If you’ve finished spring testing and are diving into reporting data, you might be looking for a refresher on what norms are and why they are important. An educational norm is simply a picture of... Read more
4.12.18 48 School Days Left – Making the Most of Them I just returned from Spring Break. Not “SPRING BREAK” like the college kids sometimes partake in, but nonetheless, a break from work, during the season of spring. This year, my family was lucky... Read more
4.10.18 We Must See Beyond NAEP Today, the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP, scores were released. What some call “the nation’s report card” often starts a debate about what NAEP results tell us about... Read more
4.3.18 It Takes a Village (of Applications) They say it “takes a village” to raise a child, and at NWEA, we believe that means a “village” of approaches: students do better when teachers apply a variety of tools to help them... Read more
3.27.18 Five Ways to Help Parents Get the Most Out of MAP Growth Results As spring testing season approaches, teachers, principals, and other administrators may be looking for resources and ideas for sharing MAP® Growth™ results with parents. Sometimes parents... Read more
3.15.18 How NOT to get Overwhelmed by Data: Teacher Reports to use Throughout the Year Raise your hand if you feel like data is a dirty word? Data meetings, data interventions, data analysis... Let’s face it, for the most part, that word can stir up some negative feelings in... Read more
3.13.18 7 Ways to Prepare for MAP Growth Getting ready for spring testing? It’s likely that almost all teachers who prepared for the MAP® GrowthTM assessment last fall learned something along the way. While there’s never only one way... Read more
3.8.18 What Happens Below Zero: Meaningful Growth for Kids Who Read Zero Words Correct Per Minute It’s been cold here in Minnesota. Now for some parts of the country, cold means 30 degrees. But in Minnesota, I’m talking about subzero temperatures. Before wind chill, even. To tell the... Read more
2.27.18 Study Concludes MAP Growth Items Align to Common Core State Standards At NWEA, one question that we are often asked is how well MAP® Growth™ aligns to different state standards, including Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Today, we are excited to share that an... Read more
2.22.18 Eight Daily Classroom Data Sources to Empower Student-Directed Learning Daniel Venables, in a TeachThought blog that I still often refer to, talks about data as tools teachers can use to teach better. He provides eight sources of daily classroom data which can help... Read more
2.20.18 Less stopwatch, more heart: What football movies can teach us about oral reading fluency assessment One-on-one assessment can seem like a really important thing to protect, in the primary grades. I am in that camp myself. But I don’t think all forms of assessment need to be one on one. In... Read more
2.15.18 5 ways to support girls in STEM Although girls and boys tend to take higher-level math and science courses at relatively the same rate, women represent less than 30 percent of the science and engineering workforce. The table below... Read more