Wowzers partnered with NWEA to meet students where they are and determine where they need to go. Student needs are identified and paired with engaging content to teach students “what they need to know when they need to know it.” NWEA MAP Growth RIT scores are imported to the Wowzers’ K-8 standards-based content. This new feature automatically builds a personalized curriculum for each student based on their MAP Growth test results. It examines goal-level RIT scores and NWEA norms to assign “just the right” Wowzers content. Since each path is individualized, it can include content from multiple grade levels to perfectly suit the student.
Teacher and administrator response to this new feature has been overwhelmingly positive.

The NWEA paths were instant! Literally one click of a mouse and I had real and true personalized learning for every one of my students. Students love the immediate feedback that Wowzers gives. But it’s more than that–students get nudges and reteaching to help with understanding the math.

However, the ease of use of this new feature is only part of how we judge its success. To truly consider it successful, we needed to test whether students who use their custom Wowzers curriculum perform better on their next MAP Growth test. To check whether this is true, 12 schools and 96 classrooms during the 2017-2018 school year participated in a pilot study.
To analyze the results, we collected each student’s MAP Growth RIT scores (taken approximately 3 months apart) and the time spent in Wowzers between the two tests. The students in this study varied from Kindergarten through 8th grade.
Analysis of the data uncovered that:

• Students who used Wowzers from 2 – 3.99 hours between subsequent tests increased their effective grade level on average by 16.9%.
• Students who used Wowzers from 4 – 6.99 hours between subsequent tests increased their effective grade level on average by 20.9%.
• Students who used Wowzers from 7 – 11.99 hours between subsequent tests increased their effective grade level on average by 21.1%.
• Students who used Wowzers from 12 – 14.99 hours between subsequent tests increased their effective grade level on average by 24.8%.
• Students who used Wowzers more than 15 hours between subsequent tests increased their effective grade level on average by 26.3%.

In summary, students who used Wowzers more between subsequent MAP Growth tests displayed improvement over their previous MAP Growth RIT score. This suggests that on average, students who use Wowzers’ personalized curriculum (based on previous MAP Growth RIT scores) longer see a greater improvement in subsequent MAP Growth tests. For more information on the schools involved in this study and how we calculated students’ effective grade level, check out our full study summary.