INSIGHTS TO ACCELERATE LEARNING
FastBridge Product Updates 2021–22
This school year, Illuminate Education will introduce new and improved tools within the FastBridge system to help educators accelerate learning using student data—making equitable learning more accessible to every student in your district.
Webinar: FastBridge 2021 Release Highlights
Watch the on-demand webinar to hear about the new features and product functionality coming in the 2021-22 school year.
Dr. Rachel Brown
Senior Research Advisor
Illuminate Education
Derrick Zappa
FastBridge Product Manager
Illuminate Education
Social-Emotional Learning Enhancements
mySAEBRS Spanish Available for EL Students
Teachers need to be able to equitably assess and support all of their students, including English Learners (ELs) and accurately report their progress. As part of our ongoing commitment to helping all students feel supported, we created a Spanish version of the mySAEBRS student rater so that Spanish-speaking students can more accurately share their perspectives on their own SEB skills.
From Our Research Team: New Norms, Benchmarks & Risk-Levels
SAEBRS and mySAEBRS are now norm-referenced rather than criterion-referenced, resulting in a more accurate measure of who is at-risk. Better data means more confident decision-making about SEB instructional supports.
The risk levels have been redefined to the following:
Proven Skills-Based SEB Interventions
Educators who use SAEBRS and mySAEBRS to reliably assess student social-emotional risk will now be able to take action in whole class, small group, or 1:1 settings by selecting from more than 40 proven intervention strategies.
The interventions were created in collaboration with Drs. Greg Fabiano, Steve Kilgus, and Nate von der Embse (co-authors of the DBR and SAEBRS/mySAEBRS), so you can feel confident in the validity of the screening results and the efficacy of the interventions.
SEL Curriculum Solutions
SEB measurement and curriculum are two key components of an effective Social-emotional learning (SEL) program. Illuminate now works with the following organizations, making it easier for FastBridge customers to implement proven SEL curricula options that can work in conjunction with our social-emotional screeners to increase the effectiveness of school-wide SEL efforts.
Committee for Children offers research-based SEL materials with their curricular solution SecondStep to help address the “now what?” needs of students.
Educators can utilize SAEBRS & mySAEBRS data to select appropriate Second Step curricula to meet the specific needs of their students, and also monitor the effectiveness of their implementation efforts.
An official alignment document will be ready by the end of the summer.
EmpowerU provides schools with a highly personalized, online SEL program that helps young people replace anxiety and depression with resilience and confidence, fueling student transformation.
EmpowerU works with FastBridge customers to successfully equip students with the Tier 1 and Tier 2 skills and support they need to re-engage and thrive, before escalation to Tier 3.
ChooseLove (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization) offers a program to create safer and more loving communities through groundbreaking SEL programs that are free of cost and suited for all stages of life.
Through our partnership with ChooseLove, FastBridge Customers get access to life span programs that require little to no training with extensive, free resources, services, and supports.
Progress Monitoring Redesign
New Progress Monitoring Setup
Based on input from hundreds of customers, we've completely redesigned FastBridge’s progress monitoring dashboard, making setup easier than ever. This fall, teachers will benefit from being able to:
- Set up multiple types of progress monitoring groups based on the district's needs and workflows, including the ability to edit plans, release students from interventions, and view progress monitoring graphs
- Keep students' growth on track with visual indicators for missed progress monitoring assessments
- Save valuable time by setting up interventions directly from the Screening to Intervention report
- Use a consistent workflow to set up progress monitoring across reading, math, and SEB domains
And as a bonus for users of both products, the new user-friendly dashboard will look very similar to the EduClimber dashboard!
Assessment Updates & Other Enhancements
New Partnership with MetaMetrics/Lexile® for aReading
Illuminate Education is excited to announce our partnership with MetaMetrics. Together we've linked FastBridge aReading scores to the Lexile framework, replacing the estimated Lexile measures that were previously available. As a result, educators will enjoy greater precision in assigning reading passages to their students based on Lexile measures. Lexile measures will be available in the Screening to Intervention (S2i) report for grades 2-12 at the conclusion of Fall screening. Additional reports are planned for the future.
Image and Passage Improvements to earlyReading and CBMreading
- Illustrations throughout the earlyReading English Sentence Reading subtest have been updated to depict more racially diverse characters and settings to better represent the students completing FastBridge assessments.
- Image updates to Sentence Reading
- Passage updates to Sentence Reading and CBMreading
Updated Norms for aReading and aMath (Grades 7-8)
The national norms for both seasonal norms (fall, winter, and spring) and growth (fall-to-winter, fall-to-spring, and winter-to-spring) have been updated. The update also affects default benchmarks because the benchmarks are tied directly to the national norms.
Demographically matched seasonal and growth norms have been updated for the following measures:
- aReading (grades 7 & 8)
- aMath (grades 7 & 8)
