The Challenge: The district’s English department needed a way to track data and improve skill and standards performance on high school exams.

Pine Bush Central School District spans three counties in seven towns in New York State. It serves a diverse population of approximately 4,590 K-12 students across rural, urban, and suburban areas. 

As a data-driven district, leaders in the English Language Arts (ELA) department wanted to learn as much as possible about their high school students’ standards performance to prepare them for the Regents Exam—New York State’s standardized assessments—in eleventh grade.

From their research, district educators found four ELA standards on which students consistently scored below 60%. Pine Bush needed a tool to evaluate students’ progress across these standards at different grade levels throughout the district. They also needed a tool to guide future data collection, help inform targeted instruction, and support interim assessment development.

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The Plan: Use Formative to create and administer common skills-based assessments to measure students’ standards mastery progress.

Teachers at Pine Bush had been using Formative since before the coronavirus pandemic for assessment creation and delivery, and it had become a more critical tool during remote and hybrid instruction. When standardized testing resumed following the pandemic, they needed a way to address the identified gaps on the Regents Exams.

This initiative pushed Pine Bush to use Formative even more intentionally to create and share common ELA assessments across grade levels to gather consistent and timely student performance results. 

In the ELA department’s monthly working sessions, teacher teams at each grade level collaborated to create their own common, skill-based midterm assessments in Formative using various content sources.

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The Impact: Common assessments focusing on standards-specific content improved students’ test scores across all demographics.

With Formative, Pine Bush educators were able to collect the data they needed and create targeted standards- and skills-based assessments and lesson plans, which led to a dramatic increase in standardized testing scores on the four identified standards from 2021 to 2024. All four standards increased to 60% answered correctly, and three of the four standards increased to above 70% correct.

“On our next Regents results, our scores went up for all students on those standards. We didn’t see a dip in subsets or a difference based on race, sex, nationality, or English language learners. We really [improved] across the board,” Cooke said.

Formative also delivered data sooner and more frequently than waiting for standardized test results. With common formative assessment data, teachers could quickly fill in the gaps and get a pulse on student performance to guide their instruction.

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Replicate Pine Bush CSD's success at your district:

• Institute common assessments to ensure consistent standards progress across classrooms and grade levels. 
• Use real-time data to monitor student progress and pivot instruction as needed.
• Provide teachers with a collaborative workspace to create, edit, and share common assessments.