Hope School MAP Scores: State-Wide Comparison

by Kristen Okabayashi, Hope Principal

Hope K- students recently completed Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) standardized testing in math, reading and language (language is grades 3-8 only). MAP is online and is adaptive, so each student’s test will be slightly different from one another depending on how they answer each question. As a result, teachers and families are able to have a clear picture of what each student’s academic strengths and areas for improvement are. For this reason, it is important for each student to do their best work on each testing category, so teachers can know where to focus their instructional efforts. 

Public schools in Washington take smarter balanced assessments; the state recently released results for these tests from last spring. If you are interested, you can read more about the state-wide results from this recent article in the Seattle Times. 

Overall, the goal on smarter balanced tests is for students to be measured as “proficient” which would be testing at a level 3 or 4, while not proficient is a level 1 or 2 on the test. The cut off for the levels is static, so it is not a measure of percentile compared to other students. State-wide, in math 37.7% of students tested as proficient, and 50.7% of students tested proficient in language arts/reading, for the spring 2022 testing period. 

After reading the article, I was curious to see how our own students compared with the state-wide results. MAP has a tool where the software can project each student’s test results into the smarter balanced assessment format, so we would be comparing like items. Looking at our K-8 population, 74% of our students are measured as proficient (level 3 or 4) in math, and 76% are proficient in language arts/reading. Out of all the school districts in Washington, only one district tested slightly higher than Hope students in language arts (Lake Washington School District, at 78.5% proficient) and none of the school districts tested higher than Hope students in math.

Standardized testing is just one method of evaluating how a student is performing, but it is one of the only actual specific data points we have for measuring learning mastery, so it is helpful to know this information. We will test again in late January/early February and then again in May. 

Teachers at Hope are determined and relentless in helping each student reach their learning potential. Thank you to these wonderful and talented faculty for their commitment, which is apparent in the MAP results.