{"id":20382,"date":"2023-10-10T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-10T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nwea.org\/blog\/?p=20382"},"modified":"2025-06-30T14:08:39","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T21:08:39","slug":"map-growth-can-lower-the-cost-and-increase-the-accuracy-of-gifted-and-talented-placements","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nwea.org\/blog\/2023\/map-growth-can-lower-the-cost-and-increase-the-accuracy-of-gifted-and-talented-placements\/","title":{"rendered":"MAP Growth can lower the cost and increase the accuracy of gifted and talented placements"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I first became interested in assessment because I believed in what it could do. I believed it could help educators, administrators, and policymakers better design and target instruction, which can result in better learning experiences for students. But I also know that any assessment requires time and energy that could be devoted to something else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was a teacher, I was always aware of the fact that the time I spent grading could have been devoted to lesson planning. The time my students spent taking a quiz could have been devoted to one of my endlessly engaging activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The perpetual balancing act of teaching and assessing led me to a golden rule: all assessment needs to pay for itself by increasing student learning. If I gave a one-hour quiz, I decided, I needed to then use that data to make students\u2019 learning time at least one hour better. Most often this took the form of using the assessment results to identify content that needed more attention and moving past skills over which they had demonstrated mastery. In either case, I wanted to be sure my students were learning more or were being more appropriately challenged because of an assessment. As educators, we owe it to our students to squeeze 100% of the possible benefit out of the assessment data we get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Guidance for using MAP Growth data<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For the last 15 years, I\u2019ve worked to help schools get the maximum benefit out of their assessments. A classroom vocabulary quiz and a college readiness exam, to name just two examples, have no value unless they can inform an educator\u2019s lesson planning and help make students\u2019 learning experience better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I came to NWEA, one of the first things I wanted to do was develop guidelines for how, when, and where MAP\u00ae Growth\u2122<\/a> data could contribute to advanced learning placement decisions. Who should be placed in a gifted and talented service? Who is ready for Algebra 1 in seventh grade? Which students would benefit from starting kindergarten early? These are all questions that MAP Growth data can help answer and for which we at NWEA have developed some guidelines to help support partner schools and districts<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Placement decisions for any kind of selective program are always challenging and controversial. Inevitably, some students will be missed, the process often requires a lot of time and energy, and increasingly, there are concerns about equity and fairness. We developed our new guidance document with four criteria in mind: cost, alignment, sensitivity, and access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n