The MAP Growth Goal Explorer
All students deserve the opportunity to work toward meaningful and realistic academic goals. But goal setting can be challenging, and different students need different goals. How do you determine the right goal for a student? How do you know if a goal is too easy or too hard? Will the goal identified help the student advance to where they need to be academically?
What is this tool?
The MAP® Growth™ Goal Explorer simplifies the goal-setting process by helping students, families, and educators identify meaningful student goals that, if attained, would be significant accomplishments for the student. This tool will help you determine how realistic a goal is, with the understanding that the most useful goals are rigorous and challenging. That said, we also don’t want to set students up to fail.
How should this tool be used?
The MAP Growth Goal Explorer should be used to support conversations between teachers, families, and students to establish goals that strike a balance between what is meaningful and what is realistic.
Help students set meaningful and realistic goals
What to do next?
Setting a roadmap or action plan to achieve the chosen goal helps keep students on track. There is no set approach that is appropriate for all students, but the following steps provide a framework:
- Collaborate with students to set growth goals that they are motivated to achieve.
- Establish concrete activities that students understand and can pursue autonomously to achieve the goal. The Student Profile or Class Report provide information about specific areas to focus on as well as areas of greater mastery to celebrate and build upon.
- Check in with students regularly to monitor motivation and progress towards execution of the goal.
Definitions
A computer adaptive assessment used to measure your student’s achievement level and growth over time. Teachers can use MAP Growth results to differentiate instruction, identify student strengths and weaknesses, and tailor classroom lessons to meet your student’s needs.
The overall score for a subject based on a Rasch unit (RIT) scale that indicates how your child performed in a subject area.
Achievement: How well a student has learned skills in a subject compared to similar students nationwide.
Growth: A measure of a student’s progress over the year.
The percentage of students in the US population for this grade and subject area that this student’s score equaled or exceeded.
Similar students are those with approximately the same starting RIT score, the same number of weeks of instruction, and in the same grade and subject area.