By: Graeme Scott, Deputy Head of School for Learning
graemes@isb.ac.th
Dear Parents,
MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) and ISA (International Schools Assessment) assessments will be uploaded to Powerschool and will be available from today, Friday, 11th May. To access these assessments, go to powerschool.isb.ac.th and log in with your username and password. To open the document use the password in red on the screen once you login. If you experience difficulty with logging in, please contact our Ed Tech department.
Please remember that we use many different types of assessment to measure student progress. Most assessments of student learning are done by their teacher in a ‘normal’ classroom setting. MAP and ISA are two popular and well-researched external assessments but they are broad in nature (as they are designed not for specific schools, but for huge numbers of students across the globe), and they only assess some elements of what students learn here at ISB. They are also administered in different conditions to those the students normally learn in. They represent one point of data in a much bigger discussion about student learning and progress.
You may have a chart at home on the wall, where you measure your child’s growth in height. In a similar way, these assessments measure growth in learning and, much the same as height, this growth is rarely regular and can happen in spurts. It is not practical for example, to expect regular, predictable learning growth each year. That is not typically how children learn. Equally, the higher the level achieved, the harder it is to demonstrate further progress in these assessments as the margins become narrower and our students can ‘top out’. For this reason, we no longer administer MAP in grade 9. Only students in grades 3-8 take the MAP assessment and those in grades 3, 5, 7 and 10 take the ISA assessment.