Dear Shanghai American School Parent:
As you may know, Shanghai American School is now in its second full year of MAP formal implementation phase in fall of 2012-13 for elementary and middle school students. SAS will administer the test twice during the academic year, once in the fall and once in the spring. The fall results will be coming home this Thursday with the Trimester 1 Report Cards.
The tests help the SAS educational professionals determine your child’s instructional level and measure academic growth throughout the school year, and from year to year in the areas of reading, mathematics and language arts. The results of the tests are included with the last report card. A Normative Data chart will be attached to your child’s scores, which shows the average (mean) and middle (median) RIT scores for different grades for a typical school.
A RIT score is a different type of measure than a typical test that provides a percentage correct. It is also different from many tests that provide results based on your child’s score compared to others in his or her grade (a percentile ranking). Instead, the RIT score is an equal-interval scale, like feet and inches, which is independent of grade level. You can find out more about RIT scores here: https://www.nwea.org/support/article/532. Or watch a video tutorial here:https://community.nwea.org/videos/RIT-101.
In some cases a student’s RIT scores may have gone down or their growth may be in the negative range from fall to spring testing. If this happened with your child please do not panic as this is a single snapshot of the child’s progress and cannot be considered as an indication of a lack of learning. Our guide here is the Northwest Evaluation Association who states, “Each assessment is only a snapshot at a single point in time. Negative growth does not necessarily mean a student is not learning, or that classroom instruction has not been effective, or that NWEA data is not reliable. Rather, negative growth allows for additional opportunities to change the way we discuss our students’ learning. Instead of ignoring these instances as anomalies or assigning blame for their results, we should recognize negative growth as an important element in the culture of data driven instruction. Simply put, for unexplained reasons student scores sometimes fall.”
As SAS continues to develop our data driven instructional practices, we believe we can address these anomalies while at the same time meeting the needs of the students whose learning challenges may not have been detected before with our old tests. It is our intention at SAS to continue to administer the MAP test and look for trends that can be examined and determined. Next spring SAS will begin administering a protocol in which we will retest some students who have large drops in growth.
Shanghai American School has put together an informational website that will give you information on the MAP test, reading your child’s test results and answering most questions you may have concerning MAP testing and test results. Links to other resources for parents are also available on this site. The address for this site is: https://iwebpx.saschina.org/sasmap/map/MAP_FAQs.html. Additional information is also available from Northwest Evaluation Association at https://nwea.org. Please note that for further information for parents, you can download the Parent Toolkit at https://www.nwea.org/support/article/930/parent-toolkit.
As always if you have any questions please feel free to contact your school principal, vice principal or counselor.
Sincerely,
Dr. Alan Knobloch Mr. Andrew Torris
Deputy Superintendent – Puxi Deputy Superintendent – Pudong
