GUIDE
Jump-Start
High Growth
Instructional Strategies
with MAP Growth
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Introduction
Nobody understands the impact of COVID-19 on student learning better than
administrators and the teachers they support. Reams of data have been collected
articulating the challenge.
How can we help educators move beyond merely looking at data to using it to inform
decisions that improve outcomes for kids?
The NWEA white paper The Transformative Ten: Instructional Strategies Learned
from High Growth Schools describes ten instructional strategies teachers can use
to optimize their students’ time, expose kids to more content, and empower their
entire class to demonstrate high-level thinking. These strategies can work in any
classroom to help teachers dierentiate instruction while still exposing students to
grade-level content.
In this guide, we explore how MAP® Growth™ provides unique advantages to the
teachers and schools looking to put these strategies into practice so they can better
reach students across the entire achievement spectrum.
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Part of a comprehensive assessment system
MAP Growth provides information about student achievement during a particular
academic term, and about student growth over multiple terms. Its unique strength is the
comparability of MAP Growth scores over multiple administrations (Meyer and Dahlin,
2022). With MAP Growth data, teachers working individually or in teams can understand
an individual student’s achievement relative to grade-level norms and on a scale that
spans several grade levels.
Having MAP Growth data at hand can be particularly useful at the beginning of a school
year, when teachers have had few opportunities to get to know their students and want
ways to get started dierentiating instruction. How the school year starts is important. For
students, it sets clear expectations about the work of the year. For teachers, it provides the
opportunity to introduce new instructional approaches with comparatively few competing
priorities. With our Instructional Connections program, MAP Growth data can facilitate initial
placement in over 40 dierent supplemental learning tools, providing an easy way to get
started with technologies that support small-group and individual instruction.
As an ongoing measure of how students are learning, formative assessment provides key
information for facilitating the strategies contained in The Transformative Ten on a weekly
and daily basis. Formative assessment is the set of instructional practices that provide
information on what students know and can do, from formal-but-ungraded quizzes all
the way to informal checks for understanding. The strategies in The Transformative Ten
depend on a consistent stream of up-to-date and precise information on student learning
that only regular formative assessment can provide.
In this way, MAP Growth and formative assessment work together as part of a comprehensive
assessment system. MAP Growth provides long-term, quantified evidence of student
achievement and growth across academic areas, suggesting a place to start dierentiating
instruction and prioritizing resources. Winter and spring MAP Growth administrations
provide an important benchmark of student learning that helps teachers confirm their own
assessments and can support resource-allocation, curricular, and other long-term decisions.
Formative assessment provides regular and ongoing evidence of student learning during
instruction, driving in-the-moment decisions based on what and how students learn.
To help educators better understand the relationship between MAP Growth and formative
assessment in practice, NWEA professional learning focuses on providing teachers the
knowledge and skills they need to understand what students have learned, apply that
understanding to instructional decisions, and empower students to take ownership over
their own learning.
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The Transformative Ten
Derived from observing more than 75 hours of instruction at a high-growth school,
the Transformative Ten are instructional strategies that can work in any classroom,
subject, or grade level to help teachers dierentiate while still exposing students
to grade-level content. The strategies are grouped into three themes:
Optimizing instructional time
1. Provide supplemental learning time for targeted retrieval practice
2. Mix whole-group, small-group, and individual activities
3. Adjust student groups in real time
4. Share students and strategies within a grade level
Exposing students to more content
5. Dierentiate tasks within a unit
6. Provide targeted practice for foundational skills
7. Teach from multiple standards at once
Empowering students
8. Create opportunities for self-directed learning
9. Use student discourse as formative assessment
10. Explicitly teach academic vocabulary
This guide examines how MAP Growth data can be used to support the strategies.
For more details on each strategy, download our white paper.
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Optimizing instructional time
Strategies for optimizing instructional time are, for the most part, structural: they relate
to how the school day is divided, where students spend their time, and what instructional
tools and content areas they work with. Our white paper emphasizes the need to maximize
teacher flexibility by providing structures that allow them to shift students between content
areas, types of activities, sizes of groups, and teachers, as needed, ensuring students spend
as much time as possible working with the content that will help them grow.
The rigor and scope of MAP Growth can provide much of the information administrators
need to make that flexibility work.
• The School Profile report provides detailed information on the growth and
achievement of all students in aggregate by grade level. It also provides distribution
of student scores across achievement quintiles, showing how student performance
compares to millions of their peers across the nation. This information—alongside
additional classroom performance and assessment data—supports making informed
decisions about how groups for supplemental learning time should be portioned
(Strategy 1) and the content focus areas that best support students within each grade
(Strategy 2). It potentially informs how students should be sectioned in upper grades
either for intervention (Strategy 1) or core instructional time (Strategy 4).
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• The Class Profile report allows teachers and instructional leaders to examine similar
information at the level of each classroom. With information about a classroom’s
average achievement and the distribution of student achievement by percentiles,
teachers and instructional leaders can understand the extent of academic diversity
within a grade level, where students most need supplemental learning time (Strategy
1), and the comparative strengths and weaknesses of students in dierent classrooms
(Strategy 4). These findings can help teachers and instructional leaders begin to plan
the flexible group and individual instructional activities that form the backbone of
these strategies.
• Our Instructional Connections program links MAP Growth information to over 40
popular supplemental instructional resources. These, in turn, provide important
content for supplemental learning time (Strategy 1) or for small-group instruction
(Strategy 2). By placing students using MAP Growth scores, teachers can save
time while still retaining the flexibility to adapt supplemental instruction based on
students’ formative assessment results.
The high-level view of student achievement and growth provided by MAP Growth and its
instructional connections can help both administrators and teachers allocate resources
to maximize student growth and ensure strategies are equitably serving all student
populations. Formative assessment complements this data by providing information on a
regular basis for how to manage each individual student’s learning plan.
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Exposing students to more content
During a typical school day or week, teachers can provide all students rigorous access
to grade-level content and also tailored instruction that meets them where they are. The
second main section of The Transformative Ten provides three strategies that do this by
giving students more opportunities to interact with more and dierent types of content
during the day.
For teachers, MAP Growth data provides valuable insights into making decisions about
content and dierentiation—as long as MAP Growth scores are not used to exclude
students from particular content.
When using Strategy 5, a teacher named Christina, who was interviewed by our
researchers, described a strategy for dierentiating tasks between two sections of
seventh-grade humanities using MAP Growth scores. Students were grouped into these
sections with other students with similar scores: this allowed Christina to tailor whole-
group instruction to each section’s needs. It’s important to note that both sections used
the same grade-level text, and both engaged in tasks with that text that were complex
and appropriate to their learning. Christina’s school uses winter and spring MAP Growth
scores to reassign students to classes in winter and spring that reflect their learning.
In cases like these, the global view that MAP Growth takes can help teachers and
administrators plan instruction more quickly than they could reasonably gather a similar
amount of formative assessment information. These groups, however, should remain
flexible based on what students learn over time, and no group should be excluded from
exposure to grade-level content, additional practice for foundational skills (Strategy 6), or
the opportunity to learn from multiple standards at once (Strategy 7). In other words, MAP
Growth can provide a rigorous tool to support class- and school-level decision-making but
should not be a barrier to the content or types of tasks individual students access. NWEA
Instructional Connections can be an eective tool for supplementing student learning
based on a MAP Growth score without excluding lower- or higher-scoring students from
grade-level core instruction.
MAP Growth measures student learning at one point in time. Students can—and do—
learn a great deal between MAP Growth testing periods. As part of a comprehensive
assessment system, MAP Growth can provide a regular view of student achievement and
growth that speaks broadly to what students have learned, provides important balance to
the views of their classroom teachers, and facilitates decisions that must be made early in
an instructional period to help a school run smoothly. While initial student groups based
on MAP Growth scores can be a great help to educators, they should be the launching pad
for student growth rather than a permanent box.
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Empowering students
The final set of strategies in The Transformative Ten focuses on instructional practices that
allow students to access high-order thinking skills. As learning becomes more complex,
the role individual students play in their own learning increases. To engage academic
content in complex ways applicable to real life, students must understand what they
are learning, how they are learning it, and what they can do to make their learning more
eective. MAP Growth is an important tool for students to understand their learning and
plan for future learning.
• The Student Profile report and the Family report are the best ways for students,
alongside their teachers and families, to understand what their MAP Growth results
show about their achievement. These reports also help educators understand student
growth over time. Both reports show an individual student’s achievement and growth
level relative to national norms. The Student Profile report also shows student
achievement in specific instructional areas within subjects. This information provides
students and teachers with relative areas of strength and opportunity compared to
their overall score.
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• The MAP Growth Goal Explorer provides a typical and aspirational growth target for
a student based on their grade level, fall score, and subject area. The goal explorer
also shows the levels of growth students need to meet state proficiency and college
readiness benchmarks in that academic year. Similarly, the College Explorer tool
shows older students the levels of growth they need to become eligible for admission
to colleges and universities around the country. These two reports can help students
understand what their MAP Growth RIT score means and support the motivation
students need to be successful in self-directed learning (Strategy 8), connecting what
they are working on in the classroom with concrete and measurable learning gains
that will help them achieve their life goals.
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Used together, these reports and tools can support conversations between teachers,
students, and families, where students take primary ownership and responsibility for their
learning. All the strategies in The Transformative Ten complement student goal setting, a
set of practices around working with students to establish concrete learning goals, assess
progress toward those goals, and make meaningful changes to their learning plan to help
those goals come to fruition (Nordengren, 2022). Whether stated as goals or not, students
who understand why they’re learning what they’re learning are more able to engage in the
substantive discourse (Strategy 9) and self-directed learning (Strategy 8) that characterize
high-order thinking.
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In closing
MAP Growth plays an invaluable role in a comprehensive assessment system, providing
leaders longitudinal data about the impact of their instructional initiatives and teachers
perspective around their students’ growth relative both to their peers and the broader
subject area. Access to this information proved important to teachers and leaders
featured in The Transformative Ten who used MAP Growth data to establish class sections,
evaluate what instructional resources to purchase and develop, and, in some cases, initially
group students. However, teachers and leaders focused on high growth also understand
that students learn quickly and that regular formative assessment provides the best
ongoing metric for how students engage in learning and what learning groups they
participate in.
This open-minded approach to how students learn and what they are capable of achieving
allows for dierentiating to meet students’ needs without “tracking” students into permanent
groups that prevent them from accessing grade-level content. By prioritizing growth, students
and educators focus on what students can learn, not just what they have learned.
This simple mindset shift, in combination with the kinds of shifts in instructional practice
described in The Transformative Ten and supported by rigorous data through tools like
MAP Growth, can drive extraordinary and consistent improvements in student learning.
Visit NWEA.org/map-growth to learn more
References
Meyer, P., & Dahlin, M. (2022). MAP Growth theory of action. NWEA. https://www.nwea.org/research/publication/
map-growth-theory-of-action/
Nordengren, C. (2022). Step into student goal setting: A path to growth, motivation, and agency. Corwin Press.
https://us.corwin.com/en-us/nam/step-into-student-goal-setting/book277600
NWEA, a division of HMH, supports students and educators worldwide by providing assessment solutions, insightful reports,
professional learning oerings, and research services. Visit NWEA.org to find out how NWEA can partner with you to help all
kids learn.
© 2023 NWEA. NWEA and MAP are registered trademarks, and MAP Growth is a trademark, of NWEA in the US and in other countries.
The names of other companies and their products mentioned are the trademarks of their respective owners.
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