NWEA 2020 MAP Growth

NWEA 2020 MAP Growth

Achievement Status and Growth Norms Tables for Students and Schools

Yeow Meng Thum Megan Kuhfeld

April 2020

Suggested Citation: Thum, Y. M., & Kuhfeld, M. (2020). NWEA 2020 MAP Growth Achievement Status and Growth Norms Tables for Students and Schools. NWEA Research Report. Portland, OR: NWEA.

? 2020 NWEA. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be modified or further distributed without written permission from NWEA. NWEA and MAP are registered trademarks, and MAP Growth is a trademark of NWEA in the US and in other countries. 121 NW Everett Street Portland, OR 97209 | 866-654-3246 |

NWEA 2020 MAP Growth

Achievement Status and Growth Norms Tables for Students and Schools

Yeow Meng Thum Megan Kuhfeld NWEA Portland, Oregon

April 8, 2020

Contents

Achievement Status and Growth Norms

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Appendix A - School and Student Status Norms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Appendix B - School and Student Growth Norms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Appendix C - School and Student Status Percentiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Student . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Appendix D - Student and School Conditional Growth Distributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Language Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

Appendix E - Student and School Conditional Growth Percentiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154

Mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242

Language Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399

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Achievement Status and Growth Norms Tables for Students and Schools

The purpose of this document is to present the new 2020 NWEATM MAP Growth R achievement status and growth norms tables for students and schools. The full norms report will be available in Summer 2020.

MAP Growth norms provide comparative information about achievement and growth from carefully defined reference populations, allowing educators to compare achievement status, and changes in achievement status (growth) between test occasions, with students attending the same grade at comparable instructional stages of the school year. For achievement status norms, a student's Rasch Unit (RIT) score is associated with a percentile that shows how well the student performed on a test compared to student peers in the norming group. The relative evaluation of a student's growth from one period to another (e.g., from fall to spring) is provided by growth norms.

MAP Growth norms are distinctive in several ways. For most educational assessments, students are examined in a single test administration throughout the school year. Achievement norms produced from these types of assessments enable educators to evaluate the relative standing of students for a given population for each corresponding test administration by grade and academic content area. These norms have three basic properties. First, they presume that students are maximally engaged when they take their tests and that their results are all uniformly valid. Failure of this assumption generally underestimates how well students actually performed. Second, normative comparisons in such a setting are demonstrably fair because testing all students at the same instance and under standardized conditions results in an accurate reflection of how well each student performed given the same level of instructional input. Third, norms tables for such assessments typically consist of a finite, and usually small, number of score-to-percentile tables specific to content area and grade.

In contrast, the target population for the MAP Growth norms does not assume that students are all maximally engaged at testing. Only test scores of test-engaged students attending a U.S. public school from Fall 2015 through Spring 2018 are employed. Next, NWEA partners administer MAP Growth assessments without a fixed, common testing date for all students. For example, a significant proportion of tests administered during spring testing are distributed over a five-week period between April and May each year. As a result, students who tested during the same school term do not typically possess the same level of instructional exposure when they take MAP Growth, and their results cannot be compared directly with one another. This implies that a fair normative comparison of students on their MAP Growth scores requires calibrating a measure of instructional input that addresses the variation in partners testing schedules. MAP Growth norms may then be constructed that reflect performance commensurate with the student's instructional exposure based on the date of her test and the unique testing schedule of the district. When

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Table 1: 2020 RIT Norms Content Area Coverage

Grade

Content Area

K 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Reading Language Usage Mathematics Science

Status and Growth Norms

successful, this effort supports sets of norms specific to each reasonable level of instruction exposure. The number of days of instruction counted from the beginning of the school year to the date of testing is deployed as the proxy for the magnitude of instructional exposure1. Lastly, the result for MAP Growth is an infinitely large set of continuous time achievement norms, each corresponding to the performance of students with a specific number of instructional weeks. Only a small fraction of the potentially large number of tables, which are most frequently accessed by NWEA MAP Growth partners, is presented in this report.

Despite the complexities of building norms when students vary in the amount of instructional exposure they received before testing, the MAP Growth norming procedure takes advantage of the joint variation of instructional exposure and scores from individual student longitudinal testing history to estimate the dependence between achievement outcomes and levels of instructional input. This relationship supports constructing norms for fair evaluation of both achievement and growth that are conditional on how well a student performs on their pre-test and how much instructional exposure they have had at their pre- and post-test. The result is an additional set of norms for comparing growth that is specific to a student's starting RIT score and the number of instructional weeks at each test within a grade (or two adjacent grade levels) and content area. Table 1 shows the coverage of the present release of MAP Growth norms. Table 1 shows the coverage of the present release of MAP Growth norms.

In summary, to accommodate the significant variation in instructional exposure and initial performance for all students, grades, and content areas, the set of MAP Growth norms for both achievement status and growth can be very large. MAP Growth data also support the construction of a parallel set of norms for school grade levels; a by-product of the multilevel modeling procedure employed to described variation of scores over time for students, who are nested with schools. Because nine terms from up to three consecutive years (and therefore from up to three adjacent grade levels) of student longitudinal data are used to construct the norms for each grade level, the notion of focal grade is central to the ways MAP Growth norms are defined. The focal grade is simply the grade level for the 2016-2017 school year. Status norms refer to achievement distributions evaluated at each instructional day or week during 2016-2017.

Table2 shows the relationship between instructional days and weeks to testing seasons for the status and growth norms of focal grade g. Only school testing seasons involved in the seven supported growth comparisons are displayed. Even though tailored instructional weeks afford greater precision for each student, only tables for modal instructional weeks in traditional testing terms of fall, winter, and spring

1Rather than counting days of instruction, a five-day week is the unit employed instead to measure instructional exposure. Instructional weeks represents the amount of instructional exposure the student has had when tested. Use achievement norms at instructional week = 2 to compare students who have had two weeks of exposure to instruction.

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Table 2: Relationship between Data Year, Seasons, Instructional Days and Weeks, and Growth Terms for Focal Grade g Status and Growth Norms

Data & Instructional Calendar

Growth Norms

Instructional

Status L. Spring1 Fall Fall Fall Winter L. Winter L. Spring

Year Grade Days Weeks Season Norms Spring2 Winter Spring N. Fall Spring Winter Fall

2015 g - 1 100 20 L. Winter 2015 g - 1 160 32 L. Spring

Start

Start

Start

2016 g 200 40

Fall Fall

Start Start Start

End

2016 g 280 56 Winter Winter

End

Start End

2016 g 340 68 Spring Spring End

End

End

2017 g + 1 380 76 N. Fall

End

For Growth Norms: 1 Starting Term, 2 Ending Term, L=Last, N=Next g is focal grade.

are produced here given the space limitations of this document. That is, the tables in Appendix A and Appendix C are for the default instructional weeks most commonly encountered for each term (i.e., Weeks 4, 20, and 32 for fall, winter, and spring, respectively). These values assume a school year with 36 instructional weeks (or 180 days). Therefore, in the tables that present term-to-term growth over a full instructional year (e.g., spring-to-spring), the two terms are separated by 36 instructional weeks. Similarly, fall-to-winter growth, winter-to-spring growth, and fall-to-spring entail growth spans of 16, 12, and 28 instructional weeks, respectively. To the extent that actual interval between testing occasions deviate more than three weeks from the default spans, inferences about the results using the tables provided here should be drawn cautiously. The preferred alternative when exact input values are required is the NWEA reporting system. A further option is to employ specially devised norms calculators calculators developed by the NWEA research team to determine norm values for other arbitrary combination of input values for student, or school, starting RIT score, and the instruction week of each testing occasion.

Appendix B provides marginal growth norms by focal grade for relevant growth terms. Appendix D and Appendix E adopt a convention for reporting growth norms that is conditional on starting RIT scores. Starting RIT scores corresponding to 19 evenly spaced quantiles of the pre-test score distribution are employed. The percentiles were selected to detect smaller changes around the center of the distribution relative to those toward the tails. The tables in Appendix E employ a similar convention for conditional growth percentiles. When using tables from any of these appendices, it is likely that the exact values of interest will not appear in a table. In these cases, it will be necessary to use some combination of rounding and interpolation. The NWEA reporting system, or the norms calculators, should be employed when exact values are required.

The user should consult Thum and Kuhfeld (2020, forthcoming) for further details.

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Appendix A - Student and School Status Norms

This appendix provides the achievement status norms for each content area, grade, and term. Status norms estimates consider the number of instructional weeks preceding a test administration. Table A.1 reports norms for mathematics and reading; Table A.2 reports norms for language usage and science. Within each grade by content area cell cluster, the mean, and standard deviations for schools and for students are presented for each term. The means are the same for both schools and students. The set of three Ns in the last row for each content area and grade cluster represents the number of schools, students, and scores employed in the cluster, respectively, to estimate the achievement and growth norms for the respective grade level.

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