MARION COUNTY – Students in Marion County Public Schools showed significant growth in academic areas tested in the nation’s first state-wide progress monitoring system.
Launched last August, progress monitoring involves testing students at regular intervals during the school year instead of annually toward the end of each year.
This new assessment system means comparisons are more accurate when made within the same year instead of year-to-year results for different students in different grade levels. The goal of progress monitoring is to measure individual student growth within the same academic year.
The Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST) tool provides the platform for progress monitoring for grades VPK-10 for English Language Arts and K-8 for mathematics. FAST assessments are aligned to the Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking (BEST) and are administered three times per school year.
Among this year’s highlights for Marion County Public Schools:
- MCPS students in grades 3-10 overall demonstrated 16 percentage points of growth in English Language Arts from August 2022 to May 2023. The largest increases of 23 percentage points came from both third and fourth graders.
- MCPS students in grades 3-8 overall demonstrated 39 percentage points of growth in math from August 2022 to May 2023, with the largest increase of 47 points by fourth graders.
Other subject areas remain based on annual testing, including several End of Course (EOC) exams. The latest results for MCPS students show:
- Fifth graders improved their science scores five percentage points over last year, surpassing the state’s three-point gain.
- Biology EOC exam scores increased five percentage points over last year, outpacing the state’s three points.
- U.S. History EOC exam scores increased two percentage points, the opposite of the state’s three-point decline.
Year-over-year comparisons for FAST and BEST EOC assessments will come next year when all subjects tested will have data for two consecutive years.
Florida’s Department of Education will adopt assessment cut scores this fall to calculate school grades, expected sometime this winter.
For more information, visit www.fldoe.org/accountability/assessments/.