By Haley Radcliffe, Secondary English Education Major / Brentwood Borough School District Intern
With the first day of school having come and gone at Brentwood Middle School, we are into the thick of instruction here in week three of eighth-grade English Language Arts (ELA). The students are well into a grammar unit, studying parts of speech, phrases, and clauses, and they recently took their first quiz on the material. This week, however, the students will take a break from their studies for a few days to take the Reading Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) assessment. As a measure of student achievement and growth in the ELA content area, the results of the Reading MAP® assessment will serve as a starting point for one of my primary responsibilities during my internship: organizing and analyzing student assessment data in order to design instruction that recognizes areas of student strength and addresses areas of student weakness.
While my host teacher already has a sense of student achievement in ELA from the small-scale assessments she has administered in the classroom, once we receive the students’ Reading MAP® assessment results, we will be able to organize and analyze their levels of achievement in broader strokes. The Reading MAP® assessment provides data on student achievement in several key ways, most notably by presenting an overall RIT score that can be used to predict student performance on state assessments like the PSSAs as well as by presenting specific scores on several content area topics. Some of the topics assessed on the Reading MAP® assessment, for example, include “Informational Text: Meaning and Context,” “Literary Text: Meaning and Content,” “Vocabulary: Determine, Clarify Word Meaning,” and many more, all of which are aligned with Common Core state standards and include various subtopics. As the students’ scores for each of these topics come in, my host teacher and I will be able to identify specific areas of student strength and weakness and design future instruction accordingly.
Designing instruction based on the students’ strengths and weaknesses as exhibited by the results of the Reading MAP® assessment will also be the basis of my final project for my internship. By the end of the semester, I plan to have written a three-lesson mini-unit addressing one or more areas of student weakness along with a pedagogical statement that justifies the need for the unit based on the student data from the September Reading MAP® assessment and explains how the specially-designed unit will contribute to student growth in the identified area(s) of weakness. Ideally, if I am able to implement the specially-designed instruction in the classroom this semester, the students will exhibit growth in the area(s) of weakness when they take the December Reading MAP® assessment. Of course, my host teacher and I will not be able to identify the areas of strengths and weakness to focus on for this project until all of the students’ MAP® assessment results are in, but once they are, we’ll be ready to get to work!
Building Bridges 