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Learning Technology Grant Program Overview: Mount Markham School District

Award Years: 2021-2024

Targeting with Tech (TWT): Closing Reading Gaps With MAP Fluency

Mount Markham School District is located in the beautiful, rural Mohawk Valley region in the town of West Winfield. Our district is large, serving 1,100+ students from four different counties covering 200 square miles. We would be implementing this program in the Elementary School, which serves around 400 students K-Grade 4, plus 30 Pre-K students, of which approximately 58% qualify for free or reduced lunch. Foundational literacy skills are essential to master at the elementary level, and MAP Fluency can provide us with insight as to the specific needs of each student in terms of their literacy gaps. We are currently categorized as a “high needs, rural” school district, which makes providing high quality and effective instruction absolutely critical to facilitate the academic growth of the children of our community.

MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) Fluency is an adaptive universal screening program for reading foundational and fluency skills which provides direction for teachers to implement interventions to meet student needs. Through a 20-minute computer-based oral assessment, it offers precise, reliable insights to support early readers while maximizing valuable instructional time. This research-based interactive assessment supplies an audio recording component enabling teachers to listen to each student’s oral reading performance with flexible accessibility. Unlike traditional one on one assessments, which take up a tremendous amount of valuable teaching time and can be skewed by teacher bias or error, MAP Fluency can be administered to entire classes simultaneously through the use of noise-cancelling headphones and microphones.

Goals of Mount Markham’s TWT Project

  • To use technology to increase awareness of specific reading gaps so that teachers will better understand the needs of their students and can plan interventions accordingly.
  • To provide teachers with high quality professional development that will empower them to navigate the new MAP Fluency program, as well as engage with new tools and resources that will specifically target the reading gaps that are promptly identified by the program itself.
  • To help our school achieve one of the 2021-2026 MMCSD Board of Education Goals, which is to reach 90% of students reading on grade level by grade three in five years.

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