My Academic Plan (MAP) is a career exploration and decision making system created by Iowa State University for Iowa's middle and high school students. MAP has been approved by the Iowa Department of Education for meeting the state board standards as outlined in 281 – Iowa Administrative Code chapter 49.6(3).
Offered free of charge to every school district in Iowa, MAP guides students through a series of steps which allows them to:
Identify their own unique interests, work values, and skills through simple online inventories.
Explore career options which best match their interests, work values, and skills.
Plan their high school course schedule with their career goals in mind.
Explore college majors or training programs which prepare them for their intended career, and then identify a college or training program which best fits them.
MAP is not a one-time exercise! Because students go through many changes in grades 8-12, MAP is designed for students to return frequently to reassess their own interests, values, and skills; to re-explore career options; and to update their academic information as they progress through each term of high school. MAP even sends automated email messages to students encouraging them to return and update their information.
MAP provides students with multiple resources for improving their:
GPA
ACT scores
scholarship eligibility
college and career readiness
employability
MAP also provides helpful information concerning scholarships, financial aid, and military/vocational/apprenticeship options.
All of your high school's courses are already pre-loaded into MAP, and short videos appear throughout the system to guide students through each step:
MAP Video Overview
Nearly every step throughout the MAP system contains video icons similar to the icons below. Each of these icons represents an informational video pertaining to the step at hand, and assists students in navigating and understanding the system.
Click on the video icons below to view MAP in action.
The MAP Counselor Portal is available only to authorized school district staff. This portal allows staff to:
View reports within the MAP system
Make any necessary edits to their high school’s courses which have been pre-loaded into MAP
Reconfigure the credits assigned to each course (for those schools which do not award the traditional number of credits: 0.33 for a one-trimester course, 0.50 for a one-semester course, etc.)
Enter their high school’s graduation requirements for each subject area: English, math, science, social science, world language, and electives
“Try out” the MAP system as if they were a student
As a security measure, any staff member who creates an account in the MAP Counselor Portal must have their account request approved by the school principal before access will be provided. The approval process is as follows:
Staff create their account on the MAP Sign Up page just as the students do, with one exception: when selecting the “User type”, the staff member must select their role.
At the bottom of the Sign Up page, the staff member specifies which school(s) they are affiliated with.
Upon submission of the account creation page, the approval process begins with the following steps:
The email address in the staff member’s account is compared to the email address of the principal whose school was selected. The email domain (i.e., portion of the email address which follows the @ symbol) for both addresses must match.
If the email domains match, the staff member will receive an automatic email with a link. The staff member must click on the link to verify their ownership of the email address.
An automated email is then sent to the principal of the school selected requesting that access to the MAP portal be granted to the staff member. The principal will approve or deny the request, and the staff member will receive immediate email notification.
Note: This approval process will need to be repeated each year.
There's really no need for a middle school counselor to request access to the high school because the middle school counselor will automatically be able to access their former students as they progress through high school.
Keep in mind that if you grant a middle school counselor access to your high school, they will be able to access all high school students (not just their former students). In addition, granting them access to the high school will also give them the ability to edit your high school courses, which may not be desired.
As a middle school staff member, there’s really no reason for you to request access to your high school since MAP automatically gives you access to your former students’ MAP information as they progress through high school. You just won’t be able to see the MAP information for any of the other high students who did not attend your middle school.
As Iowa’s land-grant university, Iowa State University has a responsibility to use the knowledge, expertise and technology developed on our campus to benefit the lives of Iowans. We believe MAP fits perfectly with this mission.
We utilize the high school course information that was contained in last year’s winter data submission which your district submitted to the Iowa Department of Education (IDE). Your high school courses will be automatically updated each summer based on your previous year’s winter data submission to the IDE.
Since MAP is free to all Iowa school districts, there is no formal contract or sign-up for the district. Students from any district in Iowa may sign up and use MAP at any time, without any permission from Iowa State or their school district.
Counselors or other school staff who wish to access the MAP Counselor Portal need to undergo an approval process which confirms they have a business need to access student information from MAP. This approval process is described in a separate FAQ answer.
Your high school’s courses have been pre-loaded into MAP. This list of courses came from your school district’s 2015-2016 Winter data submission to the IDE.
You may easily add, delete, or change your courses by clicking on the Manage Courses tab in the Counselor Portal. Because MAP utilizes the SCED coding system to manage your courses, you’ll find numerous SCED code resources to assist you in making changes to your courses.
Each year, we will load a new file of your high school’s courses (which comes from your district’s previous Winter data submission) into a staging area in MAP where you may compare this list of courses to the list of courses which are currently in MAP. Then you will be given the choice to either automatically replace your current list of courses with the new file or not.
Important: Before you submit changes to your school’s course listing, please be sure your school’s administration approves your changes.
MAP is 100% web based and designed for modern web browsers. It will work in recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and likely others.
MAP is optimized for tablet and Chromebook use, but some of the drag-and-drop features may or may not work using a touch interface, depending on the browser. It appears that Firefox works the best on a touch device.
MAP provides several search and reporting features in the MAP Counselor Portal. These features allow authorized staff to view students who have signed up from their school(s).
Additionally, there are reports available within the MAP Counselor Portal that show student participation, progress, and various metrics. Each report is searchable by various fields.
There are two reports available in the MAP Counselor Portal:
Participation report - this report provides a list of students who have signed up for MAP, including their current progress and completion of various checkpoints.
Metrics report - this report provides details regarding student metrics, including planned credits, estimated GPA, estimated ACT, College/Career Readiness Score, selected cluster, pathway and career.
MAP has a U.S. based call-center available 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. central time weekdays with staff trained on the basic support of MAP, as well as a tiered support model for more advanced questions.
MAP is not organized into grade levels. Rather, MAP is designed to guide students through a series of progressive steps:
Exploring your values, interests, and skills.
Identifying a career which best matches those values, interests, and skills.
Planning your high school courses based upon the career pathway that interests you most.
Exploring your college/career readiness.
Exploring your options beyond high school by selecting a college major or training program, and then selecting an institution which offers your major or training program.
While teachers may choose to spread these steps out over multiple terms, MAP is actually designed for students to go through the entire system in one term.
However, MAP is not a one-time exercise! We know your students’ interests and abilities are constantly changing as they grow, as is the world of work around them. Your students who complete the MAP system will receive occasional email messages while they are progressing through high school encouraging them to keep returning to MAP to:
Re-take the values, interests, and skills inventories
Re-explore their career and post-high school training options based upon their shifting values, interests, and skills
Update their high school course plan based upon any changes in their career goals
Update their academic information at the end of each term to see how this has impacted their college/career readiness
MAP does not come with specific lesson plans because it’s meant to be a flexible tool that schools can use however they wish. Some schools may choose to have their students go through the entire system in just a few weeks, while others may use the whole semester.
For example, if you have nine weeks or an entire semester to devote to college and career planning, then you may want to consider dividing MAP into sections and supplement the MAP activities within each section with other related activities. If you have nine weeks, you could divide MAP into three sections as follows:
1st three weeks
Career Exploration
2nd three weeks
High School Course Planning/College and Career Readiness Score
3rd three weeks
Exploring Options Beyond High School
For the Career Exploration section, you could spend a week reviewing the importance of work values. For example, you could have your students take the Work Values Assessment, and then divide them into six groups based on whichever one of the six work values was most dominant for them. Then each group could be asked to present to the rest of the class why their particular work value is so important. Each student could also be assigned to select a working adult in the community, have that person take the Work Values Assessment, and then ask that person how closely their current job matches their most dominant work value. You could spend the next week doing similar types of activities around the Career Interest Inventory, and then devote the third week to having your students select a career cluster, then a pathway within that cluster, then a career(s) within that pathway.
We’ve found that a number of school districts have security measures in place which can cause issues with using the MAP system. For example, some districts have very restrictive rules regarding links, and these rules can prevent students from accessing some of the features within MAP, such as the interest, values, and skills online inventories which are part of MAP’s Career Exploration section.
Below is a list of the URL’s which are critical for the MAP system to work in your school. You should ask your school’s IT staff to make sure these URL’s are white-listed:
Also, below are additional URL’s which are linked to the MAP system to provide your students with added resource information. These are all trusted websites, so you should ask your IT staff to make sure they are white-listed as well.
Because we know students’ interests, values, and skills evolve throughout their high school years, MAP is designed to allow students to repeat the same steps each year. It all begins with the student’s work values and career interests. Any changes in those will have a cascading impact on everything else that follows, such as choosing a career cluster/pathway/specific career, changing the 4-year plan to reflect the new career choice, selecting a college/university/training program that best fits the new career choice, etc. (In fact, if students change their responses to the work values and career interest section, MAP requires the student to complete all of the subsequent steps again.)
So we encourage students to go back to the beginning each year and repeat all of the steps, including updating their high school cumulative GPA and ACT score in the College and Career Readiness section. MAP keeps a record of these changes so the student and counselor can see how the student’s career exploration has evolved over the years.
Finally, please keep in mind that MAP is just a tool to develop the student’s Individual Career and Academic Plan (ICAP). While students might repeat these same steps each year, our hope is the school will have different types of lesson plans or classroom activities each year which are grade level appropriate.
Unfortunately, MAP does not come with a prescribed set of lesson plans or classroom activities. However, we’re planning to reach out to all the schools across the state who are using MAP and ask if they’d be willing to send us sample lesson plans and classroom activities which they’re using in their own schools. Then we’ll create a repository of these lesson plans and activities so that any counselor or teacher will be able to access them through the Counselor Portal.
