Getting More Out of Firefly and CDT Results in Pennsylvania

Every assessment follows the same overall cycle: measure, interpret, act, check whether it worked, and adjust. How often we can actually complete that cycle, and importantly, do it effectively, has more effect on instruction than the quality of any single measurement.

How Often Pennsylvania’s Assessment System Returns Data

If you’re already using Firefly to understand the level of your students, Pennsylvania’s benchmark system completes that cycle up to three times a year. Firefly’s 2026-27 seasons for grades 3-8 are:

• Fall: October 5 to November 29, 2026
• Winter: November 30, 2026 to February 28, 2027
• Spring: March 1 to April 16, 2027

Students can test up to three times, and the Individual Student Report shows one test per season in its Progress graphic. If you get BOY results back in November, make adjustments based on them during the winter, and then have to wait until early spring to actually see if the adjustments worked, you have waited more than half of the school year to see, and it can be very difficult to then assess what students need.

While these checkpoints like Firefly provide valuable information, a district that can act more quickly, more frequently, and check on student understanding at a more granular level can truly tailor their instruction to what students need.

What Firefly Reports Tell You and What They Don’t

What the Firefly Report Shows

A calibrated prediction of spring performance. Firefly estimates the percent chance a student lands in each PSSA or Keystone performance level, and PDE notes it’s the only state-funded benchmark that provides that prediction. There are two important notes they provide about these predictions:

• The prediction assumes the student stays on their current trajectory. It isn’t an estimate of how they’d score if tested today. A student with identical fall and winter scale scores can receive a lower winter prediction, because they didn’t progress between administrations.
• Prediction accuracy is highest for spring test-takers. PDE notes the standard error of prediction is higher for block-schedule students taking Keystone Exams in winter.

Position against on-grade expectations. Firefly reports three performance levels (Support Needed, Near Target, and Prepared), subdivided into six bands built on conditional standard error of measurement (CSEM). The scale measures how far a student is from where a student at that grade is expected to be by spring.

A reporting-category profile that matches the assessment. Firefly’s reporting categories are the PSSA and Keystone categories, so the profile maps directly onto the accountability picture.

A starting list of eligible content. The Instructional Supports dashboard surfaces eligible content for a student’s reporting category, paired with a skill description calibrated to their band using Webb’s Depth of Knowledge. PDE’s worked example follows ELA Grade 3 eligible content A-C.2.1.1 from identifying the point of view of a basic passage at Band 1 to explaining how point of view affects how events are described at Band 3.

PDE also describes the scope of these supports: they “were not designed to be comprehensive curricular outlines but rather reference materials for reorienting or reinforcing instruction.”

Five Questions the Report Doesn’t Fully Answer

Which standard, specifically? Firefly runs 36 operational items spread across four to six reporting categories, so some subscores rest on a relatively small number of items.

Pooled across a class or grade level, six adaptive items give a reasonable basis for an instructional decision, but for an individual student, their results may reflect specific standards, not the full spectrum of everything they learn.

How far below grade level is this student? Firefly administers on-grade items only and won’t serve off-grade items regardless of how many a student misses. PDE’s guidance is to use the CDT for students known to be significantly below grade level.

Measurement precision also varies across the scale. Bands 1 and 6 are the widest. In ELA Grade 3, Band 1 spans scaled scores 180 to 394 (215 points), while Band 3 spans 459 to 533 (75 points). PDE notes CSEM is lowest in the center of the scale, which means the report is least precise for the students furthest from grade level.

This affects a large group of students. On the spring 2025 PSSA in math, 30.9% of grade 6 students, 37.8% of grade 7 students, and 43.9% of grade 8 students scored Below Basic, roughly 132,000 students across those three grades.

Did the intervention work? Firefly reports progress as the change in scale score between administrations, classified as Not Yet, Low, Medium, or High. That answer arrives later in the next season.

Was the plan carried out? Firefly identifies needs and points to eligible content. It doesn’t assign practice to students, score it, or track it over time. A fifth-grade teacher with 24 students across six bands and five reporting categories receives a set of needs and a reference list, and the district has no view of what happened in the classroom afterward, plus the teachers themselves are expected to then pick up where Firefly leaves off to actually create and assign the practice students need.

What about writing? Firefly doesn’t include text-dependent analysis (TDA) or open-ended items. PDE states this directly and explains that the predictive model was built to account for their absence. On the PSSA ELA test for grades 4-8, though, the TDA item is weighted four times, making it the heaviest single item on the test. Firefly’s writing subscore covers Conventions of Standard English only, with eight items, so it doesn’t provide instructional information on TDA writing.

How the CDT Fills Part of the Gap

The CDT, also free from PDE, addresses two of those five questions.

How far below grade level. The CDT permits off-grade items specifically to support diagnosis. PDE frames the difference this way: the CDT shows where a student is today, and Firefly shows where they’re headed.

Which standard. The CDT administers roughly the same number of items in each diagnostic category, which gives approximately equal precision across categories. Its Learning Progression Map reaches the eligible content level and links to Standards Aligned System resources.

The CDT runs about 48 to 60 items, is untimed, can be scheduled across multiple days, covers grades 3 through high school, and can be given up to five times a year.

It also has limits:

• The CDT doesn’t predict summative performance. Firefly does. PDE is clear that the two aren’t substitutes.
• Running both means reconciling two tests, two scales, and two reporting systems, and that work usually falls to one person.
• Neither assessment shows whether an intervention is working between checkpoints, whether assigned work was completed, or how students are doing on TDA writing.

What remains in both cases is moving from an identified need to assigned, scored practice and back to evidence within a few weeks.

Addressing Gaps Between Firefly Administrations

Watch our Pennsylvania expert, Albert, show how Progress Learning goes even further with Firefly or CDT data

Talk To Albert About Using Progress Learning in Pennsylvania

Firefly and the CDT handle identification. Progress Learning supports the work in the days and weeks after results come in. The workflow below follows the same order as the demo video.

Starting Point Depends on Whether You Have CDT Results

If you’re using Firefly only, start by assigning a domain assessment built around the reporting category Firefly flagged. This generates enough item responses to show which specific standards within that category need attention, which answers the “which standard” question from the Firefly report.

If you have CDT results, skip that step. The CDT already reports at the eligible content level, so you can assign targeted practice against those needs directly.

Building and Assigning the Work

• Targeted practice. Questions aligned to PA Core Standards and Pennsylvania’s STEELS science standards, with a mix of multiple choice and technology-enhanced items, the same item types students see on Firefly and the PSSA.
• Video lessons. Lessons for the relevant standards can be included in the same assignment, so students get instruction along with practice.
• Educator-written content. Items and lessons are built in-house by an academics team of former classroom educators.
• Assignment to specific students. Assign work to the students identified in the report, with accommodations available at the assignment level.
• Scheduling and settings. Set start and due dates, rearrange assignment components, and adjust completion requirements.
• Results and follow-up. The results report shows how students performed, and teachers can reassess and assign further remediation automatically based on those results. This completes the measure-act-check cycle in days.
• Item analysis. Teachers can see which specific questions a group missed and model the approach with the whole class.

Coverage and Reporting

• The platform covers all four core subjects, K-12. The demo above uses Biology Keystone content, but the workflow is the same across subjects.
• For students in grades 2-8 who are well below grade level, the group Firefly’s on-grade items can’t place precisely, Liftoff provides adaptive Tier 2 and Tier 3 intervention that starts students at their current working level.
• Reporting rolls up from specific items and assignments/assessments for individual students all the way up to class, campus, and district, so central office staff can see whether planned interventions are being assigned and completed at any level.

How Firefly, the CDT, and Progress Learning Fit Together

The state systems record the results of that work but don’t organize it. Doing that takes tools that put a specific standard in front of a specific student, show a teacher on Wednesday what a student missed on Tuesday, and let a principal or district staff see whether the plan is running in classrooms. In practice, that means:

• Teachers don’t have to build differentiated practice from scratch for 24 students across six bands.
• Students get practice and video lessons on the specific standard they’re missing, not just the reporting category.
• Interventionists have evidence sooner about what is working.
• Central office staff can see whether the plan is being carried out well before spring results arrive.

Firefly and the CDT show where to focus, but a platform like Progress Learning fills the day to day gap that makes sure the insights you receive are actionable. Get in touch to see more of how Progress Learning works in action.