TESTING SMARTS: San Francisco-based NoRedInk will partner with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) to offer adaptive feedback helping students improve on the MAP language tests, starting in the 2015-2016 school year.
“The reason that students struggle so much with skills in grammar and style is the wide gap between students writing a paper and the multiple choice way that they’re assessed,” NoRedInk CEO and founder Jeff Scheur tells EdSurge. Scheur says NoRedInk’s non-multiple choice engine leads to improved student retention of learned information and better overall test scores. His supporting data: according to a third-party study released by NoRedInk involving students at Shadow Ridge Middle School in Thornton, CO every 10-percentage-point increase on NoRedInk correlates with more than a full grade level of improvement on the MAP tests. Thirty-six percent of the students in the study improved by more than two grade levels.
With the partnership, teachers of grades 4-12 will be able to upload a classroom’s MAP data into NoRedInk’s engine, which will recommend learning paths for each student’s performance level. The integration will cost $500 per school.
