FastBridge Reading
Quick Facts
- Grades K-1 and 2-3 as needed
- Assesses phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding and fluency
- Fall: Grade 1;
Winter: Kindergarten and Grade 1;
Spring: Kindergarten;
other grades as needed - Approximately 12 minutes
FastBridge Reading is a screening tool that is individually administered to students. A teacher inputs data electronically as students respond to assessment items. Information from the FastBridge assessment is used alongside other formal and informal data to guide instruction and monitor student progress with early literacy skills.
FastBridge is used as a screener and can instantly inform teachers if additional assessment data is needed.
Assessment Methods
Kindergarten - Grade 1
The FAST Early Reading assessments allow schools to screen and monitor a student's progress in developing reading skills. Early Reading performance is an indicator, or "thermometer," of student reading development. It is designed to assess reading skills that predict successful reading of connected text.
Grades 2-5 (as needed)
Curriculum Based Measurement for Reading
(CBMreading) is an efficient and effective way to screen student reading progress. A teacher listens to a student read aloud from a grade-level passage for 1 minute and inputs data electronically as students respond.
FastBridge Asssessed Components
Phonemic Awareness
The ability to identify language sounds.
- Onset Words: student must produce and identify the first sound of a word.
- Word Segmenting: student says all the sounds in a word.
Phonics
The ability to connect speech sounds to letters and make them accessible by sight.
- Letter Names: Student asked to name upper and lowercase letters.
- Letter Sounds: Students asked to name sounds for upper and lowercase letters.
- Nonsense Words: Students asked to read a list of phonetically correct nonsense words.
Fluency
The ability to read text.
- Sight Words: Students asked to read a list of age appropriate site words.
- Sentence Reading: Student reads individual sentences from a story accompanied by pictures.
- CBMR: teacher listens to student reading a grade-level passage aloud for 1 minute while recording errors.