Assessment

North Carolina District Chooses MAP for Formative Assessments

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/15/15

A North Carolina school district will be adopting a computer-based formative assessment program to enable its teachers to differentiate instruction for students. McDowell County Schools has chosen Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) from the Northwest Evaluation Association, a not-for-profit educational services organization that focuses on assessment programs.

MAP will be used by 5,000 students in grades K-9. The district has about 6,500 students in total at 13 schools.

Once each term in fall, winter and spring students will take online assessments in adaptive form for reading, language arts and math. The tests last less than an hour, and results are delivered within 24 hours. Teachers will be able to use the results to develop an instructional approach and new goals for each student. The software allows educators to analyze their own students' results against others within the same class, grade, school, district or state or 35 million students across the country.

"Our district continues to pursue ways to push beyond boundaries and implementing MAP will be another means to reach our goals," said Curriculum & Instruction Specialist Brooke Mabry in a press release. "It will be an empowering tool for our educators to use in their classrooms and will be very informative in creating learning plans for each student."

MAP has also been used by Bullitt County Public Schools in Kentucky, Blue Valley Schools in Kansas and Tempe Elementary School District in Arizona, among many other school systems.