BHS Data Dashboard

 

 

For additional information provided by the Michigan Department of Education, please click on a link below.

• What parents should know about state testing
• What parents can do to help students prepare

State Law requires schools to administer a state summative assessment in ELA and mathematics to 8th grade students. Students in Grade 8 take the PSAT 8/9.  PSAT is a Preliminary SAT Test.

Students in 11th Grade take The Michigan Merit Examination (MME). This is a general assessment and includes a free SAT with Essay college entrance exam. SAT is the nation’s most widely used college admission test and is aligned with Michigan’s academic standards. The SAT replaces the M-STEP ELA and mathematics assessment components.

Our schools administer the FastBridge literacy and math assessments three times a year. Students take both computerized adaptive assessments in grades K-9.  This means that the test changes based on your student’s answers.  The test becomes more difficult the more your child answers questions correctly.  The FastBridge assessment is our universal screener for all students that replaced NWEA from previous school years.  There are many skills students engage with as readers and mathematicians across the school year.  Periodic screening data provides a window into a student’s development.   FastBridge recommends that we screen all students, including those who are on-track, in order to: 

• Evaluate current skills
• Predict future achievement, and
• Assess learning growth

FastBridge assessments are designed to be quick, efficient, valid and reliable.  Universal screeners can help us as educators identify to what extent a problem may be occurring for a specific student.  Fastbridge allows us to assess in these areas:

• Reading
• Math 

It is important to know that students are not defined by an assessment score or label.  This information is used by teachers, along with multiple sources of data and information, to help students grow individually and as part of their class. Included here is the Understanding Fast Family Report document that may be helpful in understanding the FastBridge report.  

The data represented in the graphs show the percent of students at benchmark by grade level, from the fall of 2021 to the fall of 2022.  The fall of 2021 is the first time Kindergarten and ninth grade students took the FastBridge assessment.  First grade students took early reading during the fall of 2021 and then adaptive reading during the fall of 2022. The data represented from fall of 2021 to fall of 2022 for first grade represents a different assessment. 

District-wide Kindergarten, 1st grade, 5th grade, 7th grade and ninth grade show slight increases in the percentage of students at benchmark or above from 2021-2022 in Reading. District-wide 1st grade, 2nd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade, and 9th grade show slight increases in the percentage of students at benchmark or above from 2021-2022 in Math. 7th grade scored the same as the previous year.  Other grade levels are very close in the percentage of students at benchmark or above and only differ by 1-2% in reading and math.  In math specifically, 81% or more of our students are at or above benchmark for the fall of 2022.

Lucy Calkins’ Writing Pathways performance assessments offer instructional tools to support continuous assessment, timely feedback, and clear goals tied to learning progressions for grades K - 8. Writing Pathways was initiated in BHS during the 2016-2017 school year and is therefore still in the initial implementation phase.

"These assessment tools make progress in writing as transparent, concrete, and obtainable as possible and put ownership for this progress into the hands of learners, allowing students and teachers to work toward a very clear image of what good writing entails." —Lucy Calkins, Writing Pathways

The Writing Pathways assessment system helps students answer the questions, “How am I doing?” and, “What, exactly, can I do to improve?” with the support of their teacher.

The Writing Pathways assessments support a growth mindset, specifically toward learning to write. The focus is on teaching the writer not the writing. The writing pathways rubrics are broken down by writing components. 

The overall goal of assessing students is to create a coherent system of assessment tools, methodologies and data systems that provide information to the key decision-makers to improve educational outcomes for ALL students at each stage in the learning process.

It is important to remember that data shared with the community allows a snapshot. Educators are looking at student level data to make instructional decisions and drive learning. The most meaningful data for teachers are the daily formative assessments and the item level data for individual students. However, this data can not be shared with the community. For more information related to your student’s learning, please ask your child’s teacher.

MI School Data Link

MI-Access is Michigan's alternate assessment system and is designed for students who have, or function as if they have, significant cognitive impairments, and whose IEP (Individualized Education Program) Team has determined that General Assessments, even with accommodations, are not appropriate. MI-Access satisfies the federal requirement that all students with disabilities be assessed at the state level.

MI-Access is based on Michigan's alternate content expectations for English language arts, mathematics, science and social studies.

IEP teams must follow the guidelines for participation in MI-Access. When any level of MI-Access is selected as the state level assessment for any student, schools must provide the parents/guardians of that student: 1) information regarding the academic achievement standards on which their performance will be measured, and 2) how participation in this assessment may delay or otherwise affect (or prevent) the student from completing the requirements for a regular high school diploma.

Mid Year Report

Year of Year Report