[July 22, 2014]

The School District of Palm Beach County Partners with Performance Matters and Measured Progress to Help Prepare Teachers and Students for Florida's Newest Standards

As school districts gear up to implement the Language Arts Florida Standards and Mathematics Florida Standards, educators face the challenge of creating or finding assessment content that allows them to see how their students are meeting the new goals and expectations. To ease the transition and give educators easy access to the data they need to inform instruction, the School District of Palm Beach County has partnered with Performance Matters™ to provide its 185 schools with new tools for assessment and data management, including Measured Progress^® assessment resources developed to support Florida's new math and reading standards.

This fall the School District of Palm Beach County will implement Performance Matters' award-winning assessment and data management system (ADMS), which is in use in more than 60 percent of Florida districts, and the new UNIFY assessment platform. UNIFY is the first social platform designed for educators anywhere to collaboratively develop, administer and share assessments aligned to all standards, including the Common Core, state and course-specific standards.

Included in the UNIFY platform are the new Measured Progress FLORIDA STANDARDS Assessments, which include an Item Bank, Testlets and Benchmarks designed to address the rigor and depth of the new state standards. Schools can administer the Measured Progress assessments via computer-based testing or plain paper scanning, and access comprehensive reporting and analytics as student assessments are scored. Together, the Performance Matters and Measured Progress solutions give teachers the ability to easily drill down into students' understanding of specific strands and domains of the standards, and then use that information to guide their instruction.

"Our partnership with Measured Progress allows us to provide our customers with high-quality, original assessment content, which is a critical area where schools need support today," said Woody Dillaha, CEO and co-founder of Performance Matters. "Using the new Measured Progress FLORIDA STANDARDS Assessments, in conjunction with our assessment and data management system and UNIFY, teachers can get the real-time results they need to deliver effective instruction that focuses on the needs of their students."

The Measured Progress FLORIDA STANDARDS Item Bank contains more than 6,000 multiple-choice, short-answer, and constructed-response items. With built-in sample responses and scoring notes, teachers can quickly and consistently score student work. In addition, Measured Progress FLORIDA STANDARDS Testlets include 100 short, pre-configured reading and math tests with multiple-choice, short-answer, and constructed-response item types. Measured Progress FLORIDA STANDARDS Assessments also include Benchmarks, tests that can be administered four times a year to give teachers valuable feedback about students' understanding of the new standards.

"Our partnership with Performance Matters is in line with our shared conviction that the new standards will open the door to improved achievement for all students, regardless of their personal circumstances," said Martin Borg, president and CEO of Measured Progress.

For information about Measured Progress, visit measuredprogress.org. For information about Performance Matters, visit www.performancematters.com or call (407) 645-1800.

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