This video defines the Science of Reading and covers its basic tenets, including why phonics and phonemic awareness matter and how fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension work together. Discover practical tips to support your child’s reading at home and understand what strong reading instruction looks like in school

Shundra Brown is Executive Director of Instruction in Houston ISD, supervising principals across eight campuses. In this interview, she shares how she drives instructional improvement with MAP Growth. She also explains how MAP Growth provides longitudinal growth metrics beyond unit tests and proficiency, enabling skill-level diagnosis, individualized intervention and acceleration, and year-over-year campus comparisons and analyses. The interview covers key reports, including the Achievement Summary Growth (ASG) report and STAAR Projected Proficiency report. MAP is embedded districtwide in Houston, powering student goal-setting conferences, growth celebrations to build confidence (especially below grade level), multilingual learner support and better communication of results to the school board.

In 2026, we spoke with teachers as well as school and district leaders from across Texas about why they trust MAP Growth to place students for instruction and intervention, powering greater growth in their classrooms.

Teachers hear a lot about getting students involved with their test data and goal setting, but how does that happen in practice? Last fall, we spent two days with Michelle Wiley, an instructional specialist at Phoenix Central School District in New York State. We went from classroom to classroom with Michelle as she helped kids understand their MAP Growth data and get excited about reaching their goals. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how she works with students and teachers.

Rachel Stalford of Great Valley Academy stopped by our studio at NWEA Fusion New Orleans to share how she uses AI as a teaching assistant to help plan lessons. She uses MAP Growth to inform her AI prompts—as well as a great many other decisions in the classroom.

Brian Amsler is the principal at Lincoln Middle School in Schiller Park School District in Illinois, where the NWEA Research Team first identified how these strategies work in concert to bring about growth. In this conversation, Brian speaks with Dr. David Collum, Data & Assessment Coordinator at Confluence Academies in St. Louis, MO about his efforts to put the Transformative Ten in action and the challenges to creating a high growth mindset.

Computer adaptive interim assessments are versatile tools to support learning. From universal screening to program evaluation and beyond, computer adaptive interim assessments like MAP Growth from NWEA are a great source of data and insights into student achievement and growth. There are some misconceptions about what these assessments do and how they can be used. In this video, we share the facts that you need to know if your school is using or considering MAP Growth.