As the school year begins, Sumner School District will be utilizing two new software programs to improve student and teacher performance.

One is Measures of Academic Progress, a computer-based system for K-8 testing that gauges mathematical ability in students. The other is a database program that looks like Facebook—the profiles are all students, except the only users of the program are teachers.

MAP is being introduced as an early intervention to improve high school math performance. Students sit at a computer terminal and test through multiple sections, each a separately defined topic area of mathematics. Each program adjusts its difficulty level on the fly. If a student answers a question correctly, she receives a harder question next time and vice versa. By the end of each section, the test arrives at what administrators hope is a fairly accurate approximation of the student’s skill level.

“Our goal is to improve our high schools’ math performance by 10 percent,” District spokesperson Ann Cook said in reference to the math score on the High School Proficiency Exam. HSPE replaced the Washington Assessment of Student Learning as the state high school exit exam in the 2009-2010 school year.

The other program being introduced this school year, tentatively called “data portal,” does not directly measure student learning benchmarks; rather, it aggregates all the measures of an individual student’s performance into one location accessible by any of his teachers. Sumner will be one of the first school districts to use the program, created by School Data Solutions.

“Currently, teachers who want to look at different pieces of data on a student have to retrieve them from different locations,” said Director of Research and Assessment Susie Lynch during her presentation at the August school board meeting. “It makes it harder for them to understand how different learning categories affect each other. This program will pull all that data into one place so teachers can see and compare it in one location.”

The data portal application’s features will be available on a rolling release—more features available as time goes on—but the primary functions will be available to teachers at the beginning of the school year, Lynch said.