New NWEA Dashboard Tracks Student Achievement Trends
Assessment and research organization NWEA recently launched a free dashboard tracking national trends and data on U.S. student academic achievement and growth. The tool documents how K–8 students are performing in reading and math on the NWEA MAP Growth assessment and enables district leaders, educators, and policymakers to benchmark their own local results against national data, the organization explained in a news announcement.
The dashboard draws on data from more than 7 million students in 20,000 schools across the United States. Users can switch between specific grades, student groups, states, and more. A "Trends Over Time" section illustrates how achievement has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic. Data will be updated three times a year, following NWEA testing sessions in the fall, winter, and spring.
"One of the biggest lessons from navigating the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic is how essential reliable, timely student data are for driving strategic action about student learning," said Dr. Karyn Lewis, vice president of research and policy partnerships at NWEA, in a statement. "Academic recovery has been slower and more uneven than expected, and research funding is increasingly constrained. Schools need evidence-based insights to make decisions through this complex landscape. That's why we built this dashboard: to provide updated national trends three times a year that help our partners understand where they are."
With each dashboard update, NWEA will issue a "Trend Snapshots" report highlighting key observations from the data. The latest findings from the current dashboard release include:
- Math achievement continues to show modest signs of recovery, including among historically underserved groups. The gaps have shrunk the most in elementary grades.
- Reading achievement remains stalled across student groups (regardless of race/ethnicity or school poverty level), with little rebounding to pre-COVID achievement levels. Shortfalls in reading are now larger than or comparable to those in math in some grades.
"The past five years have been marked by disruption and slower than expected academic recovery," commented Dr. Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics for NWEA. "Given the unevenness of recovery, even within schools and classrooms, national trends like these are an important first step to understanding where to dig deeper at the local level and ask critical questions about the necessary support and resources that are specific to the individual needs of each student."
Visit the MAP Growth National Dashboard here on the NWEA site.
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].