Reply to 2024-25 CES

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "2024-25 CES"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is locally norm fair?
How is a high FARM school kid scoring 85 percentile nationally beats a kid who scores 98 percentile in low FARM school?[/quote]

Search the many other threads on MAP and the magnets -- there is plenty of talk about local norming among them.  The upshot:

MCPS have been using MAP as a proxy for ability since the pandemic made other testing/measures, particularly those more specifically ability-oriented, pretty much impossible/unreliable in 2020-21, and cheaper/easier since.

MAP, a measure of learned content, provides scores that correlate highly with exposure.  The presumption is that higher FARMS rates proxy both difficulty within the classroom in reliably providing reasonable levels of exposure to highly able students and improbability of accessing alternate means of exposure outside of the classroom by the same.

Local norming, then, helps to identify those highly able but not highly exposed -- something like, "Look what they were able to do given the circumstances." 
-- and has, as a general approach, been backed by a reasonable amount of research for a variety of use cases.  This line of thought also explains the adjusted threshold for those receiving services.

The MCPS paradigm is a blunt instrument.  The locally normed 85th percentile was chosen instead of something considerably higher to be reasonably sure not to exclude any, or nearly any, of those who would have been offered a spot at a CES (previously HGC) under prior identification paradigms from the magnet lottery.  Local schools can use their greater familiarity with their students to add to the enriched local classes guaranteed to those identified centrally/entered in the lottery, but can't put those additional students in the lottery for magnet seating, itself.

Finer tuning may provide greater fidelity to the intent.  There have been minor adjustments since 2020-21 and MCPS says it will re-evaluate the paradigm at some point.  That was supposed to have been done last year, but they didn't really get to it.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics