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Since we’re still learning this blog’s readership, forgive me if this post is preaching to the choir. Suggestions for blog topics are always welcome at kingsburycenter@nwea.org

Someone recently asked me whether this thing called NORMS they saw on our website was the same as this thing called STANDARDS they’re reading about in the paper. Every question is inherently a teachable moment, so let me put my answer in print.

The new common core content STANDARDS refer to the set of skills and knowledge that educators and policymakers feel every student should know at certain levels of education: for instance, here is one of the 5th grade math content standards:

Apply the formulas V = l × w × h and V = b × h for rectangular prisms to find volumes of right rectangular prisms with wholenumber edge lengths in the context of solving real world and mathematical problems.

The emergence of clear content standards created by practitioners to be shared by the entire country is exciting work because now students who move to a new state will be able to pick up their education where their last school left off. It also makes us researchy people happy because we’ll be able to measure student progress toward common goals. And that makes policy folks happy because they can use information about teaching and learning to make better decisions. You can learn more about the common core standards here [http://www.corestandards.org/] 

As interesting as the standard setting process is, it doesn’t have much to do with NORMS, the topic of this post.

Norms are just what they sound like: the normal achievement for a certain test. At NWEA, we publish two sets of norms: status norms and growth norms. STATUS NORMS refer to the average performance of all NWEA students on a particular test: for instance, the norm performance on the 5th grade Math MAP test in the Fall of 2008 was a RIT score of 212. Why is this helpful? If you know your 5th grade child’s score (or a teacher’s or state’s average 5th grade score) is 217, you know that your child (or class or state) is achieving at a higher level than the average of hundreds of thousands NWEA students.

GROWTH NORMS refer to the average growth for NWEA students at a certain starting level between one season and another, usually between Fall and Spring of the same year. For instance, the norm growth for 5th graders who scored 212 on the Math MAP test between Fall and Spring was 7.73 RIT points. Why is this helpful? If you know your 5th grader scored 212 in the Fall and 224 in the Spring, you know that their growth was more than the average for thousands of other students.

Although this is interesting, it begs the question: What can you do with norms? Let me give you an example. A large district I have been working with this year needed a dataset to help them answer all sorts of questions about their schools and students. I put together a base set of data that had every student, their grade, their teacher, and their Fall, Winter, and Spring scores on their MAP tests. It was a huge dataset, so I put some tools on top of it to help them sort through the data quickly to answer questions. The pivot table tool helped them see at a glance what the average performance and growth for their students were in different subjects and different grade levels.

The most helpful part to them was the columns I added to show Average Norm-Indexed Growth. By connecting each student’s growth to the norms, I could show which students were doing better or worse than expected based on NWEA’s large sample of students. This district’s students with a positive Norm-Indexed Growth score were growing more than the norm; students with a negative Norm-Indexed Growth score were growing less than the norm. What made this helpful to the district was to use the pivot table tools to show average Norm-Indexed Growth for schools in comparison to other schools, for grades in comparison to other grades, for teachers in comparison to other teachers, in fact any grouping within the district could be compared to any other grouping using the norms. They could see that district-wide, they were lagging in a certain grade for a certain group of students. Then by drilling into the data, they could see which schools and teachers were doing well for that grade and group of students, and they could learn about best practices to help the rest of the district.

All this from the addition of a little thing like our NORMS. Pretty cool.