Article The Super Bowl Play of Assessments
Angie Ryg
It is coming up in our school—another “Data Day”—the Super Bowl of Response to Intervention. It is a day where teachers, specialists, interventionists, and administration all will gather to go through the assessment data of students who fall below the 25% threshold with their MAP scores. As easy as it may seem to just grab a graph and make a call, the “calls” on each child sometimes need a challenge flag to be thrown for a review: • “This student scored 24%, but it is an outlier score. The rest of their prior assessments were above 40%.” • “Well, this student falls rights at the 25%, but they continue to struggle in class.” • “This student, who scored a 65%, should have scored a 15% - they don’t know their letters at all!” Statements like these will go back and forth, each teacher wanting to do what is best for students while knowing what might be perfect may not always be feasible. Limited staff, limited resources, and even limited space to take a small group all tie into what is made available for these students who need intervention. As informative as summative assessments can be, teachers have started to adapt assessment processes to get a deeper look at student growth (Zimmerman, 2018). 73
