Maine Through Year Math Practice

About the Maine Through Year

Maine takes a different approach from most states: instead of a single end-of-year accountability test, the Maine Through Year (MTY) assessment uses NWEA MAP Growth as the official statewide math measure, given three times each school year (fall, winter, and spring) in grades 3 through 8. Maine adopted MAP Growth as the statewide instrument in 2023 and continues to use it under contract with NWEA, with results aggregated by the Maine Department of Education for federal accountability reporting. The fall and winter windows are designed to inform instruction; the spring window produces the score reported for accountability.

Because MAP Growth is a vertically scaled, computer-adaptive test on the RIT (Rasch Unit) scale, Maine students receive a numeric score from roughly 140 to 300 that can be tracked across grades and across the three within-year administrations. Reports show overall RIT, math goal-area subscores (Operations and Algebraic Thinking, Number and Operations, Geometry, Measurement and Data, and at the upper grades Expressions and Equations or The Real and Complex Number Systems), and a Lexile-style growth projection toward college-readiness benchmarks. Maine families receive a Family Report after each window.

Maine has no statewide retention policy tied to MTY scores, and districts use the fall and winter windows primarily for instructional grouping, intervention placement, and progress monitoring. Maine also continues to administer the science and social-studies portions of the older MEA program, but math is fully on MAP Growth. Because the test is adaptive and not timed, students typically finish a session in 45 to 75 minutes, and the same instrument is widely used by Maine districts as a benchmark assessment, which keeps administrative overhead low.

Official source: https://www.maine.gov/doe/Testing_Accountability/MECAS