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Table of Contents

Benchmarking Student Achievement and Growth Throughout the Year

Starting in Kindergarten and continuing throughout the educational process at Pine-Richland, we
have embedded benchmark assessments to measure students’ progress towards the grade level and
content area standards, while also monitoring progress around individualized goals for students
receiving supports. The concept behind these tools is the ability to identify areas of relative strength
and need for each child. Within the Academic System (see page 6), our goal is to tightly align the
areas of curriculum, instruction, and assessment to be responsive to students’ needs. The Multi-
Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) model allows students to move fluidly among interventions,
by content area and particular topic within each content area. Building-based teams, including the
school psychologist, intervention specialist, principal, and counselor, in addition to the classroom
teacher, meet regularly to reflect upon students’ progress. At the district-level, students’
achievement and growth is monitored by the District Data Team during quarterly meetings. It is
during these sessions that the teams review the decision trees created to help chart an intervention
pathway for students presenting with specific needs. The decision trees have assisted in ensuring
aligned systems, consistency of programming, and the regular monitoring of student growth and
achievement to allow fluid movement among the tiered supports, for both remediation and
enrichment.

The STAR 360 Reading and Math benchmark assessments were first utilized during the 2017-
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2018 school year for students in Kindergarten through 6 grade. Within 7 grade, students had
taken the STAR 360 assessment for Reading only, with the Classroom Diagnostic Tool (CDT)
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being administered for Mathematics and Science. Beginning in 8 grade, students’ progress was
then benchmarked utilizing the CDT suite of assessments across all three content areas, English
Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science, mapping to the PSSA and/or Keystone assessments
and their corresponding standards, anchors, and eligible content. Starting in the 2019-2020 school
year, the middle school piloted the use of STAR as the screener in conjunction with the CDT,
while evaluating the utility of the data produced, as well as the correlation of the results with
student performance both within the classroom and on standardized measures. There is a
recommendation going forward that the STAR replace the CDT as the universal screener, where
the CDT could be utilized as a secondary screener to gather additional information as necessary.
Regardless of the age or grade level of students, teachers are able to analyze data for the building,
grade, classroom, and individual student level for comparisons. The most valuable component of
these tools has been the tracking of student progress throughout the year in terms of scaled score
point increases, marking growth within specific competencies.

The results from these assessments can be analyzed within the system itself; however, we also
upload them to our district’s data warehouse for additional comparisons across achievement
measures. For instance, a child in grade 5 would have several data points available for comparison,
providing multiple criteria and a more robust sense of student performance. Within mathematics
alone, the students would have data available including: (a) three STAR 360 benchmark

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