We’ve composed numerous family-centric posts aimed at providing tips, ideas, and thoughts around how parents and guardians can play a pivotal role in their child’s educational acumen. As we head into the summer, we thought it would be a great idea to pull some of our more popular parent posts together into one blog that can act as a resource to help parents and students prevent summer learning loss.
According to National Summer Learning Association, all students experience learning losses when they do not engage in educational activities over the summer months and most lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills alone.Any help parents and students can lend to prevent summer learning loss over these down months can play dividends come fall.
First, parents may need a refresher on what the MAP® Growth™ test is; what their child’s score means; or how the teacher or school might be using the assessment data. Here are some great parent resources for making the most of their student’s assessment insights:
- Our most frequently referenced resource is the Parent’s Guide to MAP Growth(fun fact: it’s available in 7 languages!). It’s short, easy to print, and answers basic questions, like what we mean by a computer-adaptive test and a RIT score.
- Parents can head to the Parent Toolkit pageon NWEA.org, which features more detailed FAQs to help answer specific questions.
- For an overview of MAP Growth, we recommend this short video explanationof how the test works. (It’s also available in Spanish.)
- Parents can also experience MAP Growth from the student point of view! Watch Lyla’s storyand Michael’s story and hear directly from two students as they share what it was like to get their MAP Growth scores.
If parents have additional questions about the MAP Growth assessment, this post likely will answer them:
Looking beyond the MAP Growth assessment, there are many resources that parents have access to that can help their child with reading and mathematics. Here are a few blogs to bookmark:
With all of these resources, learning doesn’t need to take a vacation. Parents and families have the tools they need to engage their student and make the most of summer!