7.10.13 Early Childhood Assessment: 9 Keys to Effective Practice Recently, we published a paper by Dr. Cindy Jiban, titled Early Childhood Assessment: Implementing Effective Practice. If you are an early childhood educator, specialist or administrator, I highly... Read more
6.12.13 Creating High-Quality Test Items Welcome to the third post in a series of entries about how MAP assessments are aligned to content standards. Previous posts in the series discussed how we ensure test items align to... Read more
6.10.13 The Return on Early Childhood Education Investment (The Benefits of Investing in Other People’s Children) With the President’s plans for universal Pre-K defined, the next step is state implementation. While the states can qualify for funding under the President’s plan by meeting certain... Read more
6.3.13 The Importance of Teacher Collaboration in School and Student Performance If you’re a teacher and have been at it for some time I’m sure you appreciate the opportunity to chat with peers about their classroom dynamic; what’s working for them and perhaps more... Read more
5.31.13 The Myths of Early Learning and One Simple Truth I’ve been following a blog series at Next Generation titled Top 6 Myths About Early Education. The author Reynaldo Fuentes does a great job of laying down myths that opponents of President... Read more
5.29.13 Interpreting the Percentage of Students Meeting or Exceeding Their Growth Projections As we come to the conclusion of Spring testing, I find myself answering more and more questions about how to interpret the percentage of students meeting or exceeding their growth... Read more
5.29.13 MAP Test Design as Informed by NWEA Guiding Principles This is the second post in a series of blogs about how MAP assessments are aligned to content standards. This post was authored by NWEA content specialists Eric Dombrowik, Alane Ferland, and Roy... Read more
5.24.13 Teacher and Automated Essay Scoring (AES)… A Winning Combination? One of the hallmarks and frustrations of the field of education is the imprecision of the language. In education we call the same thing by many names, or we use the same term to mean many different... Read more
5.14.13 Using NWEA Norms to Establish Goals on State Tests Question: How do we use NWEA norms to identify student performance and growth goals around meeting state proficiency standards? Answer: Simply put, we can’t. NWEA performance and growth norms... Read more
5.13.13 Details of the President’s Plan on Early Learning Becoming Clearer After the President’s State of the Union speech in late February we wrote a blog post that highlighted some of his proposed early learning plans, namely a new emphasis on federal-state... Read more
4.26.13 4 Benefits of Incorporating Instructional Scaffolding in Early Childhood Assessments In an instructional setting, the term “scaffolding” or “instructional scaffolding” refers to the guidance and support a teacher offers a student when the student is learning a new concept. In... Read more
4.22.13 Aligning the MAP Assessment to Content Standards As assessment data is increasingly used in high stakes evaluations, a major area of discussion is the alignment between the assessment and the responsibility to teach content in accordance with the... Read more