Progress Monitoring Assessment in Florida – the BEST and the FAST

Recently one of our TestHound Account Managers, Lara Miller, hosted Krista Sharin, Coordinator of Special Programs and Assessments in Wakulla County, Florida, in an EAI webinar series called Conversations with Educators. During the conversation, Krista discussed the benefits and best practices of effective progress monitoring and what progress monitoring looks like today in Florida.

Q: What is the current state of student assessment in Florida?

Education is constantly changing and evolving – nothing ever stays the same. Back in the 1980s, the government began focusing on the concept of testing to track how students in individual states, and across the nation, were performing. Accordingly, Florida initiated a minimum skills competency test for graduating seniors, which evolved into a summative assessment that eventually extended to all grade levels. Recently, Florida has seen another evolution of this process from summative, end-of-year mastery to individual student growth through progress monitoring assessment.

Beginning this school year (2022-2023), Florida has new student standards and a new student assessment. The new standards are called Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (BEST), and the new assessment is Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST). The FAST assessment is aligned to the BEST standards.

With this new initiative, Florida districts are monitoring student progress three times a year through a statewide computer adaptive assessment that is given within the first thirty days of school, again in the winter, and a third time in May. This system is designed to track students' growth from the beginning to the middle to end of the school year. Although students will be exposed to questions on all the grade-level content in the first FAST administration, we don't expect them to be proficient because they haven't yet learned all the standards. As the teacher provides instruction throughout the year, we can track mastery of that content.

Q: What challenges has FAST presented?

One of the biggest challenges we saw in the first progress monitoring assessment was the time it took to complete. When we think of progress monitoring, we often think of a brief assessment – maybe 30-45 minutes. The first FAST assessment took students 90 minutes or more to complete. I don’t think the state anticipated this would take students as much time as it did.

Because students are given as much time as they need to complete the assessment, the FAST significantly disrupted the instructional day. We had modified lunch schedules, students requiring multiple accommodations – it was a bit of a logistic nightmare. Our teachers are only used to doing an assessment with this kind of rigor once a year, and they have concerns about the impact of doing this three times a year on our students.

Additionally, Florida has historically used a paper-based assessment system. Getting our youngest students comfortable with the new computer-based approach has taken some time. To help with this, we've adopted a new typing program that we've integrated into our class rotations. We’re definitely learning as we go!

Q: How has TestHound helped you navigate this change?

TestHound has been a huge help as far as testing logistics, especially with real-time data. It connects directly with our student information (SIS) and our accommodation system where all our individualized education plans (IEPs) are housed. When we’re creating testing rosters, we’re able to import them by teacher, by home room, by testing group – and all of the student accommodations are already there. We’re no longer pouring over spreadsheets or going to the filing cabinet and digging through student cumulative files to look up all this information.  

The “Copy to” feature has also been a lifesaver with moving to three tests per year. It’s so easy to make a copy of the last test administration instead of having to recreate everything each time. You should have seen my school assessment coordinator’s face when I showed her that. She was like, “You’re kidding me – AWESOME!”

We’re also able to run detailed reports like the master schedule report so all our staff know where students are going to be and the room accommodation report for testing proctors. It reduces a lot of the time spent on testing logistics and helps tremendously with test-day communications. TestHound is invaluable and worth every penny, in my opinion.

Q: Where do you go from here?

These changes to our accountability system in Florida will no doubt lead to interesting conversations between teachers and school administrators regarding student growth and instructional delivery. Student assessment is not only about tracking student performance, but also about tracking instructional effectiveness, as well. My advice to teachers and school leaders is to ask questions like:

  • What are we doing well?  
  • What isn’t working?
  • Where do we need to pivot and try something else?

Even though it’s a big change for Florida schools, this new progress monitoring system really puts data at the center of every conversation. It’s forcing us to look at the data multiple times a year, not just in a summative, end-of-year snapshot. We want to see our students succeed and we’ll do whatever it takes to get them there.

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Lara Miller, MA
Krista Sharin