Let's compare Georgia milestones and map growth

MAP Growth Assessment

MAP Growth (which stands for Measures of Academic Progress) is a test given 3 times per school year from Kindergarten through 8th grade. These formative assessments provide information to your child’s teacher regarding your child’s academic growth throughout the year.

How does it work?
The MAP Growth is taken online in the fall, winter, and spring. It is an adaptive assessment, which means that as your child answers questions, the level of complexity for the next question adjusts to your child’s response to the previous question, within or out of their grade level. Each test is informed by your student’s score on the previous test.

MAP Growth assessments help teachers understand what students know today, so goals can be set to improve growth throughout the year (rather than just at the end of a school year). MAP Growth scores are used to personalize learning, inform instruction, and monitor progress.

To learn even more about MAP Growth, please visit the nwea.org website.

Georgia Milestones

As you know, Georgia Milestones attempt to measure student mastery of the standards in tested subject areas.

• End of Grade (EOG) assessments test English and math in grades 3 through 8, science in grades 5 and 8, and social studies in grade 8.
• End of Course (EOC) assessments cover content at the high school level in four core classes required for graduation: American Literature, Algebra 1, Biology, and U.S. History.

What you may not know is that the Milestones have some significant limitations as an assessment tool.

• Milestones are taken one time at the end of the school year as a summative assessment. A student’s results are based on that single test performance, so if it’s a bad day, the results will not represent a student’s true mastery.
• While the tests are given in the spring, official results are not provided to schools until late June. By then, the student has moved onto the next grade with a new teacher.
• If results are poor for a class, it is harder for teachers to identify exactly what instruction needs to be improved, and it is too late to help the class that didn’t earn proficiency. There’s no chance to reteach because the students have moved onto the next grade. Teachers can only work to improve for future classes. (It would be up to the new teacher to reteach content.)
• The results provided are not specific. Each student will see how he or she performed in broad domains, but it does not list the specific standards. This means that teachers have little information about what exactly a student needs remediation on. This is especially challenging for a teacher who didn’t teach the content originally to the student (remember, it was last year’s teacher).
• Teachers are not allowed to see the exact items on the Georgia Milestone tests, so while they teach the standards, they do not have insights to ensure students are taught exactly what is being assessed.