Proficiency Guidance on New State Summative Assessments from NWEA
Author: Northwest Evaluation Association
Date: 2015-01-00
Type: Reports - Evaluative
Subjects: Achievement Tests,Computer Assisted Testing,Adaptive Testing,Scores,Mathematics Achievement,Reading Achievement,College Readiness,Career Readiness,Benchmarking,Academic Standards,State Standards

Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) computer adaptive interim assessments serve many purposes, from informing instruction to identifying students for intervention to projecting proficiency on state accountability assessments. To make sure its flagship product does the latter, Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) routinely conducts studies that provide estimates of how MAP RIT scores correspond to &quot;proficient&quot; and other performance levels on summative state accountability assessments. These studies provide schools and districts using MAP assessments with tools to predict whether students will demonstrate adequate reading and mathematics achievement on their state accountability assessments, and allow them to adjust instructional plans accordingly. In recent months, many school districts have requested that NWEA provide similar studies to estimate how MAP RIT scores correspond to &quot;college and career readiness&quot; as it will be measured by various tests. These include the two upcoming Common Core consortia tests-- Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) and Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC)--as well as other non-consortia tests aligned to the Common Core standards. To be clear: NWEA will conduct new studies. However, Smarter Balanced and PARCC have not yet finalized their proficiency level cut scores. Smarter Balanced did release preliminary threshold scale scores in November of 2014, but final cut score values will not be verified and adopted for either assessment until the summer of 2015 (PARCC timeline, Smarter Balanced timeline). This information is critical in conducting a linking study, since students' observed scores on both tests are examined to understand how one test predicts performance on the other. While nobody currently knows what college and career readiness scores on PARCC will eventually be, we can make educated guesses, and some states have already done so. New York, Illinois, and Kentucky have all implemented changes in their state proficiency benchmarks in anticipation of more rigorous standards. Furthermore, the preliminary threshold scale scores released by Smarter Balanced may provide additional insight into what &quot;college readiness&quot; might look like on PARCC once its performance standards have been set. These studies provide a preliminary indication of what college and career readiness may look like for MAP users in other states that align their tests to new standards. But the question remains: What can school districts that use MAP RIT scores do right now to understand whether students are on track to meet college and career readiness performance standards? One approach is to use cut scores that do currently exist from the New York, Illinois, and Kentucky tests, or from the initial estimates for Smarter Balanced, and relate them to MAP RIT cut scores. It's important to note that these state cut scores will not coincide precisely with the college and career readiness values that PARCC or other states will eventually adopt, but they may provide a guide during the interim. The tables and figures shown in the appendix may be used as rough guidelines. The values presented here simply represent an educated guess about what those benchmarks might look like, given that other assessments have defined college readiness similarly. As soon as the new cut scores and performance levels are finalized, NWEA will conduct studies that directly examine the ability of MAP to predict performance on those tests. Contained in the appendix are links used in this document.