MAP Testing

There are three ways that parents can support their child at home.  These activities are consistently associated with higher student achievement.

• Meet with your child’s teacher as often as needed to discuss his or her progress.
• Ask your child’s teacher to suggest activities to help improve your child’s understand­ing of schoolwork.
• Maintain open lines of communication with your child’s school.  Children benefit from parents and teachers working together.
• Give your child a well-rounded diet. A healthy body leads to a healthy, active mind.
• Provide books and magazines for your child to read at home. By reading new materials, a child learns new words that might appear on an assessment.

You may have a chart in your home on which you mark your child’s height at certain times, such as on his or her birthday. This is a growth chart. It shows how much he or she has grown from one year to the next. MAP assess­ments do the same sort of thing, except they measure your child’s growth in mathematics and reading skills. MAP assessments let teachers know where a child’s strengths are and if enrichment or remediation is needed in any specific areas. Teachers use this information to help them customize instruction for every child in the classroom.

Your child’s MAP results are reported in RIT scores. This is a different type of score than a typical assessment that provides a percentage correct. It is also different than many assessments that provide results based on your child’s score compared to others in his or her grade. Instead, the RIT score is an equal-interval scale, like feet and inches, that is unrelated to age or grade level of the student. As a result, we can easily measure growth in learning. This type of score increases the value of the assessments as a tool to improve student learning because it enables teachers to recognize where to focus attention for your child’s learning.