9.20.18 Measuring Early Reading: Why Anchor Standards and Foundational Skills are Both Important Maybe it’s because my son has now reached my own height (which is insane). I find myself staring now and then at the doorway out of my kitchen, where all these little height marks on the... Read more
9.18.18 3 Reasons to Observe Your Students Taking MAP Growth My fifth graders were busily taking the MAP® Growth™ Math assessment. The room was quiet. While the proctor sat at her desk monitoring testing, I walked around slowly, watching my students... Read more
9.13.18 Why NWEA Invalidates MAP Growth Tests for Rapid Guessing If you have started MAP Growth testing this fall, you saw that more student assessments are being invalidated this year than in prior years. You may also be wondering why that’s the case. At NWEA,... Read more
9.11.18 Trying on Formative Assessment in Your Classroom – How to Keep It Simple We often use interim and summative assessments to measure student learning a unit or chapter at a time. But when it comes to gathering evidence of student understanding minute-to-minute and... Read more
9.4.18 Summer Learning Loss: Does It Widen the Achievement Gap? Summer is over, and many kids are heading back to school having lost some skills or knowledge from the previous school year. I wrote earlier this summer about how MAP Growth provides unique insights... Read more
8.30.18 My Plans For Balancing It All In My 16th Year Of Teaching It is Sunday, August 19th, and I am literally flying across the country as I write this blog. At the start of the summer, I wrote about my upcoming travels for Responsive Classroom and how I would... Read more
8.28.18 Four Conversations to Have with Students Before Fall Testing I think a teacher’s most important task at the beginning of the school year is getting to know the students—who they are as people, what they’re interested in, what excites them, and what... Read more
8.24.18 PBS NewsHour features Portland Public Schools and NWEA Research Education Week’s special correspondent Lisa Stark visited Portland, Oregon, to report on Portland Public School’s Early Kindergarten Transition (EKT) program for PBS’s NewsHour. The segment... Read more
8.23.18 What’s New with MAP Reading Fluency? More Great Features Earlier this year we introduced MAP® Reading Fluency™, the first and only K-3 computer adaptive oral reading fluency assessment that uses speech recognition technology with automatic scoring. The... Read more
8.21.18 New Report from Gallup and NWEA: Assessing Soft Skills NWEA is pleased to present the fourth installment in our ongoing exploration into public perceptions of K-12 assessment. In this newly commissioned report from NWEA and Gallup – Assessing Soft... Read more
8.17.18 Will Students Read More with Culturally Relevant Books? It's a question many teachers and principals have on their minds – how to get kids more interested in reading. And it’s one topic that our NWEA account manager Jessica Lyons regularly brings up... Read more
8.16.18 Why It’s Time for a New Approach to Oral Reading Fluency Assessment Sitting on the hallway floor with reading assessment materials on my lap and first-grader Erick on my right, I lean down a bit to better hear his reading of the text. My pencil moves across the page... Read more