At Tamassee-Salem Elementary School in South Carolina, teacher Anna Durham likes to have data conferences with her third graders. She creates a simple graph of their MAP® Growth™ interim assessment scores with past and current scores, along with a future goal. She believes talking about goals--and how they will get there together--helps to engage…

Educators at North Mason wanted a cohesive assessment plan for their district. With help from NWEA, they aligned assessments to appropriate purposes and began focusing on student growth.

This article details the authors' success in using youth as a construct to facilitate literary analysis skills among high school students who claimed not to like reading--and who demonstrated difficulty with reading comprehension. The authors provide descriptions of the analysis activities in which the students participated.