Unfolding the MAP

Marushka Royse squints at the flat-screen computer monitor in front of her, agonizing over each word in the short-response answers she's grading.

The scores she awards for these answers could cost some Missouri school districts -- perhaps even her own -- large sums of money.

The middle school teacher from Francis Howell School District in St. Charles, Mo., is one of 23 teachers from across the state grading the 2004 Missouri Assessment Program seventh-grade communication arts tests this week at the Sikeston Career and Technology Center.

The teachers, who must pass an evaluation to become a scorer, spend four days learning how to score and three days actually scoring the anonymous tests.

"This is a student's real score," Royse said. "Whatever I give is what they get. That's a burden because I want to make sure they get the points they deserve, but I don't want to give them points unless they earn them."

In that balance hangs the fate of about half of Missouri's schools, which did not meet federally-required improvement levels on last year's MAP tests and now face penalties if this year's scores aren't up to standards imposed by the No Child Left Behind Act.

In past years, approximately 95 percent of MAP test questions were graded by CTB/McGraw-Hill professional scorers in California and Indiana, but the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education trains a limited number of teachers across the state each year to score the remaining questions.

"It's not about getting tons of tests scored," said Roblyn Hatch, MAP regional facilitator at Southeast Missouri State University. "It's about professional development for the teachers."

Even though the scoring process is highly confidential, scorers still find plenty to take back to their districts and share with other teachers.

"By doing this, you learn exactly what graders are looking for," said Roy Merideth, an English teacher at Jackson's R.O. Hawkins Junior High School who serves as a team leader at Sikeston's scoring site this year.

"The criticism of the MAP has been that it's dumbed down, but there's nothing dumb about the questions on this test," Meredith said. "I now know I need to make the questions on my tests equally as challenging."

The MAP tests, which include assessments in math, communication arts, science and social studies, are scanned into a special computer program that can be accessed by scorers at nine scoring sites across the state.

Scorers follow a rigorous scoring guide that lists specific items to look for in each answer. That eliminates any subjectivity, said Jana Scott, a MAP regional facilitator at the University of Missouri-Rolla who is directing the Sikeston site this year.

"They can't get off course," Scott said. "The training for this is very comprehensive."

There is also a system of checks and balances, wherein team leaders randomly rescore the test answers that scorers have graded to make sure there is a high degree of consistency, Scott said.

The math and communication arts portions of the MAP -- the two areas where schools are now required to make annual improvements -- are currently administered to various grade levels each spring. Districts will begin receiving scores for the 2004 tests Aug. 5.

cclark@semissourian.com

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