Dive Brief:

• The Northwest Evaluation Association will partner with the San Francisco-based education systems developer NoRedInk to pair NWEA’s popular MAP exams and NoRedInk’s student feedback and instruction system.
• Teachers will be able to upload student test results to NoRedInk’s platform and get individualized learning paths, which could include tutorials and other teaching tools, for each pupil.
• The program will be available for the MAP language exams in grades 4-12 beginning next school year and will cost $500 per school.

Dive Insight:

Aside from pairing the two companies’ technologies, the partnership is intended to bridge the gap between the way students are taught and the way they’re assessed.

“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,” Jeff Scheur, NoRedInk’s CEO, told EdSurge. NoRedInk’s model is intended to break away from traditional multiple choice testing and boost student performance by using alternate forms of interim assessment and support. Paired with the MAP tests, it will hopefully provide educators will more ways to make sure students are progressing and give them ways to boost poor test performance.

There’s some indication that NoRedInk may be able to live up to its promise. Scheur pointed to a third-party study conducted in Thornton, CO, that found that 36% of students using NoRedInk improved by two grade levels on MAP testing.