Benchmark Goals for Student Success
By: Rachel Brown, Ph.D., NCSP In order to know if a student is making progress toward specific learning goals, comparison with some type of standard or benchmark of success is needed. The term benchmark is widely used in education to…
Avoiding Overtesting
By: Rachel Brown, Ph.D., NCSP Testing is a fact of life in schools. Tests provide a way for teachers to know how students are doing and if the desired learning outcomes were met. For many years, the tests given in…
Top 10 Help Desk Questions and Answers
By: Todd Sundboom: FastBridge Director of Customer Success The FastBridge Learning customer support team gets many calls, emails, and chat questions each day. We have organized the most frequent of these into a “top 10” list with answers from the Help…
FAST™ Lab Status
By: Rachel Brown, Ph.D., NCSP A unique feature of the FastBridge Learning system is that new tools are first published in “Lab” status before their final versions are made available for regular use. FastBridge Learning co-founders, Dr. Zoheb Borbora and…
FAST™ Feature Focus: The Screening to Intervention (s2i) Report
By: Rachel Brown, Ph.D., NCSP During the 2016–17 school year, FastBridge Learning has updated a number of the reports available in FAST™. A new report, in Lab phase this year, is the Screening to Intervention (s2i) Report. This report is…
Conducting Social-Emotional Behavior Screenings at School: An Ecological Systems Perspective
By: Katie Eklund, Ph.D. and Stephen Kilgus, Ph.D. School Psychology Program, University of Missouri Although many schools commonly systematically screen students for academic concerns, social-emotional and behavioral screening measures are less frequently used. Yet, there are many benefits to implementing…
Behavior Screening with FAST™
By: Rachel Brown, Ph.D., NCSP Student success is the result of many factors, including positive home and school environments, effective instruction, and regular feedback on performance. For many years, schools have focused on supporting students’ academic success and recent efforts…
Setting Realistic but Ambitious Goals When Progress Monitoring
By: Seth Aldrich, Ph.D. There are several ways of setting goals for students when progress monitoring, one of the essential components in a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS). The ways in which goals are set should be aligned with the…
Universal Screening Reminders for Winter Benchmarking
By: Rachel Brown, Ph.D., NCSP FastBridge Learning recommends that all students complete universal benchmark screening assessments one or more times per year. For elementary students we recommend screening 3 times per year in the fall, winter, and spring; some middle…
