by: Rachel Brown, Ph.D, NCSP
The FastBridge Learning® system provides online training courses as part of its suite of tools. There are training courses for all of the assessments as well as for system navigation, reports, screening, and progress monitoring. These courses are designed to assist educators in preparing to administer, score, and interpret FAST measures. Each course includes one or more certification activities, and we recommend that all personnel who will conduct FAST™ assessments with students become certified for each assessment they will use. To assist school leaders in keeping track of staff certifications, FastBridge has two reports that document completion: Certification Compliance and Training Certification Management.
Certification Compliance Report
The Certification Compliance Report provides a summary of staff certifications by assessment. This report is available for both specialists and managers. For each assessment, there is a pie graph with pink and green sections. The pink represents those staff who have not completed FAST certification for that assessment and the green represents those who have. It is important to remember that not all staff will need to complete certification for all FAST assessments and your school might not have opted to use all available assessments. In order for this report to be the most useful, it is helpful to know which staff are expected to complete what certifications.
This report will also provide a listing of which staff have or have not completed the certification for each assessment. To see these lists, click on either the pink or green section of a pie graph. This will open a new report screen that lists the following details:
- Name: staff member’s name
- School: school were assigned
- Grade(s): grade level(s) assigned
- Assessment: name of FAST measure
- Status: certified or not certified
- Attempts: how many times certification was attempted
- Required Passages: How many certification tasks there are. This number ranges from one through three.
The following example shows a list of staff who completed the aReading certification.
Each staff person’s name is highlighted and can be selected to send an email. There is a button at the bottom right of the list where a message can be sent to all staff on the list.
Training Certification Management
The second staff certification report is designed to keep track of different completed certifications. This report is available to manager users only and is known as the Training Certification Management Report. Here is an example.
This report lists certifications by staff person and allows managers to see all of the certifications that a specific staff person has completed. The report includes the following columns:
- Staff: staff name
- Assessment: names of certification courses completed
- Roll: staff person’s user role
- Certification Status: certified or not certified
- Date Certified: date when certification was completed
The certification date feature helps managers know how long ago each certification was completed. Managers can also reset certification status when it is time for staff to recertify. This is done by selecting the box to the left of the staff person’s name and then clicking on the button at the bottom left of the report labeled Reset Selected Staff.
FastBridge Learning recommends that staff recertify at specified intervals such as annually or more often in order to remain up to date with assessment procedures.
There are two certification reports in the FastBridge Learning system that can be used to keep track of staff completion of course certifications. The Certification Compliance Report is available to specialists and managers and shows the percentages of staff who have and have not completed the certifications for each assessment. The Training Certification Management Report is available to managers and lists the assessments and other certifications that a staff member has completed. This report includes a feature to reset a staff person’s certification history so that the training can be completed again at regular intervals. Both of these reports assist school leaders in making certain that personnel using FAST assessments and related procedures can use them correctly.
