10.17.17 Parents and MAP Growth – 7 Things to Know As MAP® Growth™ reports get sent home and parent-teacher conference season approaches, teachers and parents alike might be looking for information to share about MAP Growth. Terms like... Read more
10.10.17 October: My Teaching Sweet Spot I love October. This year, I'm particularly excited about the month. Personally, it will include a trip to Boston College, my alma mater, with both my 3.5-year-old son and my husband. We will take in... Read more
9.14.17 Preparing for Open House Night with Assessment in Mind With school in full swing, teachers everywhere are preparing for their open house nights, when the doors to the classroom are opened and the parental questions are posed. This is a great time for... Read more
9.7.17 What is NWEA Doing to Manage Disengaged Test Taking on MAP Growth? In my last blog, I discussed the problems caused by disengaged test taking, and how we detect its occurrence when students take MAP Growth. Today, I want to share what NWEA is doing to address the... Read more
8.29.17 Rebooting Your Classroom – Five Ways Formative Assessment Can Help One blog that I’ve bookmarked, and I re-visit each summer without fail is Terry Heick’s post – The Difference Between Updating and Rebooting Your Classroom. Great read! He paints clear... Read more
8.24.17 How Does Test Engagement Affect RIT Score Validity? Our MAP® Growth™ assessment is designed to provide educators with useful information about what students know and can do, and what they are ready to learn next. But having a well-designed test... Read more
8.17.17 Top 5 Things Teachers Want from Games and Assessment From our phones to our sidewalks, it seems like games are everywhere. The language and the dynamics of games have embedded themselves in nearly every aspect of our culture, nowhere more so than in... Read more
8.8.17 Seven Things to Communicate to Students Before Testing We can all agree that students are a key stakeholder in their own education. When they are involved in the assessment process and in their own learning, the result is an improvement in achievement.... Read more
8.3.17 RTI: Is there a place for peer-to-peer tutoring during intervention? Among my stack (or should I say bulging digital folder!) of summer reading was an interesting article from Science News for Students about brain function. As a diehard language buff and... Read more
7.13.17 Understanding formative, interim, and summative assessments and their role in student learning At its core, education is about the teaching and learning process. How do we teach the necessary literacies, content knowledge, critical thinking skills, ethics, and habits of mind deemed... Read more
7.7.17 3 ways parents can help prevent summer slide 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... Read more
6.23.17 11 Teacher Learning Community Traits that Can Bring Positive Change Changing teacher practice – improving pedagogy – takes time. When teachers get together to learn about ways to implement and refine formative assessment, we often call them professional learning... Read more