Carson City elementary and middle school students have improved since the pandemic, according to the most recent Measures of Academic Progress data.
Educators use the Nevada MAP assessments quarterly to determine how students are growing in math and reading. They are computer-adaptive and administered in the fall, winter and spring. The State Board of Education assimilated the tests into its Read by Grade Three program to ensure reading proficiency by students’ third-grade year in school.
Superintendent Andrew Feuling and Associate Superintendent of Educational Services Tasha Fuson, who retired June 30, presented the results to the Carson City School Board on June 24 to show how students in 2025 performed after spring testing.
Their report revealed results on achievement, spring-to-spring growth and projected growth by quintiles as students performed more successfully on the tests. As an example, 27.7% of students were among the highest quintile in the middle school English language arts test in the spring 2025, an increase over 25.9% from spring 2024.
Results help teachers identify struggling students’ learning gaps and to develop their curriculum or methods based on needs, Fuson said. Some of these gaps occurred during or after the pandemic when instruction changed from full-time classroom presence to remote or hybrid operation. The MAP results continue revealing growth after COVID-19’s impact, Fuson said.
The use of proficiency scales that establish learning goals per grade level align teachers to state standards, provide resources and help fill in some of those reading or math gaps, she said. They’re also important because math or reading look different from grade to grade and students need different supports based on their current skills.
“(Students) might have a misconception, they might have a misunderstanding, they might have a misstep,” Fuson said. “They may have missed instruction for two weeks when they were in first grade when they covered that (concept). Teachers have to be able to identify those gaps and build those gaps, where they're never the streets are never going to be able to get to the 3.0 (proficiency scale).”
Fuson said the district has a cohort of 38 teachers trained in a research-based framework. They have volunteered to equip themselves and others in reading interventions for students with dyslexia, as well as a district literacy coordinator who will now be training the trainers. But Fuson said there’s more work to be done and said there are small gains being made.
“Honestly, we’ll probably never done because we learn and evolve, but so far, we’re very excited about the growth that we’ve been seeing rebounding after COVID,” she said.