Dear Parents/Guardians,
The Michigan Department of Education requires all students to complete a benchmark assessment for Reading and Math within the first 9 weeks of school and Kdg-3 grade within the first 30 days. In Dearborn Schools, we use the NWEA Measures of Academic Progress to fill this requirement. Given our current situation, these assessments may be administered remotely. Teachers will set up testing sessions and guide students through logging into the assessments. Students are expected to complete the assessments independently. Some students may be coming to the school for assessment in groups of 3 or fewer.
The NWEA is, as the name suggests, a measure of progress not performance. Your child is measured against their previous performance in order to measure growth. The assessment also provides specific information about your child’s strengths and areas for growth. This enables teachers to focus instruction to meet children’s direct needs and to group students with like needs for instruction.
We offer this information as a way of asking you to please allow your child to take the assessments on their own without providing input or prompting. For Kindergarten and first grade, the students are read the questions and prompts. They may hear them as many times as needed. In the other grades, the reading test is a test of the child’s ability to read, decode and use context to figure out word meanings.
We appreciate your assistance and all you are doing to support us, as well as your child, during this time. We look forward to seeing all of our students safely back in their classrooms.