The Poway Unified School District (PUSD) is located in northern San Diego County, California. PUSD operates 25 elementary schools (K-5), six middle schools (6-8), four comprehensive high schools (9-12), and one continuation high school. The District serves approximately 33,000 students.

Poway’s vision for education is that all students will graduate college-ready. With a strong focus on rigor, relevance and relationships, Poway ensures that every student is engaged in meaningful work, appropriate for their level. They are encouraged to think critically and become self assessors, while setting and achieving their academic goals.

A major component of the district’s vision of college readiness is their teachers’ ability to individualize instruction for every student. Poway does so with the help of NWEA and its suite of computerized adaptive assessments.

Poway’s challenges

Poway Unified has been working with NWEA since 1998. All elementary and middle school students in grades 2-8 take NWEA’s Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®)

assessments in language usage, reading, and math three

times a year. One of Poway’s elementary schools also uses

MAP for Science, and 16 use MAP for Primary Grades,

designed specifically for students in kindergarten through

2nd grade.

But getting to a point where so many of Poway’s students are benefitting from using an adaptive assessment didn’t happen overnight. Linda Foote, a Poway Instructional Technology Specialist, recalls having to spend time educating teachers about the benefits of using MAP assessments. In the beginning, some of Poway’s high-performing schools were resistant to the new approach to testing, which required computers. Foote says those educators felt students were already doing well and didn’t need a new form of assessment. Poway’s Title I schools, on the other hand, welcomed the system, and understood the ways their students would benefit from the computerized adaptive assessment.

“Before using MAP,” says Foote, “we were missing the full picture of how to teach kids who were gifted and talented, or struggling to learn, or were English language learners.”

Individualizing instruction

A team of IT and testing coordinators in Poway created a training program to familiarize all teachers with the technology needed to deliver MAP assessments, and Foote attended an NWEA workshop on differentiated instruction using MAP data. She returned to Poway and helped create a professional development program to help teachers make sense of the valuable data they get from MAP assessments, so they can be more effective in the classroom.

Poway Unified School District One of California’s largest and most diverse districts individualizes instruction for every student

Comprehensive Assessment Planning Process (CAPP)NWEA partners to raise assessment literacyAcademic assessments can be powerful tools for transforming outcomes when they effectively address specific educational objectives. To help maximize the value of your assessment approach, NWEA™ offers schools and districts the Comprehensive Assessment Planning Process (CAPP). This collaborative event will guide your team of educators through an in-depth discovery and planning process that results in a custom assessment plan calibrated to your values and goals.

Articulate educational priorities, values and goals

Facilitated by NWEA Partner Relations Representatives, your team will identify shared beliefs about assessments and then come to consensus on key goals.

Get a realistic picture of established academic assessments

Through an in-depth evaluation of systems, practices and processes, you will assess the effectiveness of your current approach and identify any gaps and redundancies.

Collaborate to improve academic outcomes

Leveraging the insights gained from this inquiry, CAPP will help your team establish a coherent plan for continuous improvement in assessment, curriculum and instruction designed to achieve your intended outcomes.

Learn more about CAPP from NWEA and the benefits of raising assessment literacy. Call your NWEA Partner Relations Representative at 503.624.1951

© Northwest Evaluation Association 2011

CAPP empowers your team to:

• Identify shared assessment values

• Articulate the purpose of assessments in your district

• Discover gaps or redundancies in your current assessment system

• Clarify district priorities and define academic targets

• Identify and coordinate resources and needs

• Determine how progress toward goals can be measured

• Create an assessment plan that can dramatically increase value and improve results

In just one day, CAPP will equip you with the insight and assessment intelligence to establish a sustainable assessment system, such as MAP® (Measures of Academic Progress®) from NWEA, that helps identify and meet the needs of your students and schools.

Dynamic Reporting SuiteNWEA’s Dynamic Reporting Suite (DRS) condenses essential data into a series of easy-to-understand dashboards and reports tailored to all members of a student’s learning team. DRS simplifies data analysis and offers classroom tools that assist teachers in using data to inform classroom instruction. The data provide insight into areas that need attention, allowing you to use the information when it has the greatest impact.

In addition to providing valuable reports and data, DRS delivers access to tools and features designed to respect instructional time. Enhanced printing capabilities give users the ability to print reports for groups of students as well as for individual students. DRS reports also include basic science assessment result information, allowing teachers, administrators, and district staff to quickly determine if students are meeting expectations in this subject area.

Teacher Landing Page

TeachersFor teachers, DRS classroom reports provide resources designed to guide targeted instruction, allowing teachers to immediately translate test scores into customized instructional plans for individuals or groups of students.

At a glance teachers know which students in their classes are on track to achieve growth targets and which need focused attention. Built on a foundation of timely and actionable data, DRS empowers teachers with the tools to facilitate differentiated instruction by showcasing the academic diversity within a class. These reports:

> Provide growth and proficiency information to quickly diagnose student needs and make instructional decisions when they have the greatest impact.

> Allow educators to drill down to individual test scores and see the diversity in performance across the classroom for easier differentiation.

> Engage students in their own learning plan through the automatic creation of self-populating goal setting worksheets. The worksheet pre- populates with student data and scores and can be set to compare different test terms. Compare student progress from fall to fall, for example, from fall to spring, or across a combination of terms.

Reading

40% of 15

40% of 13

Mathematics

100%

80%

20%

0%

60%

40%

100%

80%

20%

0%

60%

40%

Even kindergarteners get in on the action

Poway’s kindergarten teachers are able to engage even the youngest of learners in their own academic success. One teacher gives each of her kindergarteners their own folder, grouped by their MAP RIT ranges. These folders contain what each student is ready to learn, as projected by the MAP for Primary Grades assessment. The students spend one hour each week working on their own academic goals. “They arrive at the door asking if they’ll be able to work on their personal goals for the day,” says Foote. “It’s astonishing.”

Adaptive assessments result in growth for all

“We weren’t expecting to see such consistent, major growth for our students across the board,” says Foote. “But now that we know what our students are ready to learn before we even begin teaching them, growth is inevitable – even for our gifted and talented and Title I students.”

Thanks to Poway’s focus on adaptive assessment, every student in the district knows what his or her academic learning goals are and what they need to do to achieve those goals. “It takes some of the mystery out of learning and makes them partners in the process,” says Foote.”

And those teachers who initially feel their students don’t need to take the MAP assessment are often surprised. “We had one teacher who was really surprised by her student’s score in a learning area,” says Foote. “The MAP assessment had uncovered a major area of learning for this girl that needed special attention....the teacher realized the MAP assessment had uncovered a genuine learning need. She was then able to re-work instruction and share her expe-rience so other teachers in the district would benefit from this information.”

The meaningful, individualized instruction that comes as a result of implementing MAP assessments makes all the difference in the classroom – even high-performing stu-dents are challenged to keep growing academically. Using an adaptive assessment has truly strengthened Poway’s culture of college readiness.

Foote now offers two to four day-long professional growth courses each year on the use of MAP data to improve student learning. Schools in the district often request personalized, full-site trainings on the use of MAP assessments during the district’s two professional growth days each year.

Poway also offers a MAP “best practices” course, in which they train a group of trainers from each school four times per year. Foote manages Poway’s central online hub for everything MAP related at www.pusdmap.com, where she and other district leaders and teachers post best practices, lesson plans, teacher resources, and more.

Growth for kids “outside the bubble” too

In today’s proficiency-driven accountability climate, many districts, schools and teachers struggle to recognize or honor growth for students who fall “outside the bubble.”

Foote describes one Poway student named Bruce, who was making excellent progress according to his MAP scores; however, this student wasn’t making “adequate yearly progress” (or AYP) as mandated under the No Child Left Behind Act – because he was scoring below California’s proficiency level on the state test.

Bruce’s teachers utilized his MAP data to determine which interventions would most significantly support his growth and then diligently applied this information to his instruction. Within a year, Bruce was scoring in the proficiency range on his state tests.

One strategy Poway employs to help students like Bruce who may struggle to learn, as well as those who are consistent or in need of extra motivation, is to offer special instructional days in which students are grouped by their scores on the MAP assessments. These are called “RIT” days, which stands for Rausch Unit – the unit of measurement that forms the foundation for the longitudinal scale underlying every NWEA assessment. Students with similar academic strengths or needs are grouped together to receive more one-on-one instruction.

“Our students love RIT days,” says Foote. “They really enjoy being surrounded by other students who are similar in terms of academic ability. It increases their self esteem and they’re willing to take greater risks to learn.”

Principals and Building-level administratorsWith DRS reports, principals and other building-level administrators can quickly access essential information for deeper analysis as well as foster collaboration among school staff. In addition to access to all teacher-level information, thesereports provide:

> School and student performance relative to: • Growth • Proficiency • Norms

> The ability to drill down from a school overview to an individual student level.

> Timely results for all members of a student’s learning team, delivered in formats designed to guide decision making.

> An understanding of what proportion of students met or exceeded growth targets, or fell short of growth targets, based on national norms.

District staffDynamic Reporting Suite district reports provide the ability to assess grade- and school-level performance trends. With these reports, district staff will benefit from:

> The ability to identify patterns and trends quickly and easily.

> Longitudinal data that enable effective decision making at the district level.

> Tools that guide refined instructional planning with information at grade, teacher, and individual student levels.

> Guidance when planning for professional and staff development.

> An accurate measure of group performance.

School administrators can immediately see where their school is growing and proficient.

Areas of need across a district are apparent on the district landing page.

NWEA partners with educators to help all kids learn. Discover the di�erence that true partnership makes. Learn more at www.nwea.org or call 503-624-1951.

© Northwest Evaluation Association 2010

Reading

Grade 345

MathematicsGrade 3

45

Language UsageGrade 3

45

Proj

ecte

d Pr

ofici

ency

Abov

eBe

low

Growth IndexBelow

25.5%(27)

48.1%(51)

Above

22.6%(24)

3.8%(4)

© Northwest Evaluation Association 2012