We’ve had a busy summer, and we can’t wait to show you all of the enhancements to FastBridge Learning’s products that will be at your doorstep just in time for the new school year!
Over the coming few weeks, we’re going to be releasing more details on our top enhancements for the 2015–16 school year. First up, we’ll look at what’s new in online reading automaticity assessment.
You’ve spoken. We’ve listened.
Teachers regularly tell us that they want reading assessments that are:
- Sensitive to small changes in growth over time
- Appropriate for both screening and progress monitoring
- Brief, deliverable to groups, and available in a computer-administered format
- Appropriate for a range of grade levels and skills
- Offer a substantial diagnostic component
- Assess numerous aspects of reading, including comprehension
This fall we’ve responded by researching, developing, validating and releasing a cutting-edge, innovative suite of reading assessments that address these needs and complement the current assessments already available within the Formative Assessment System for Teachers (FAST™).
The first of our new assessments to share is our all-new AUTOreading assessment, which:
- Taps into automaticity-related skills
- Offers easy administration online individually or in groups
- Provides automated scoring
- Is standardized
- Provides accuracy data and response times
- Reports results instantly
The aReading assessment will initially include the following measures, with additional tools forthcoming in a future release:
Word identification and decoding-focused measures:
- Letter Names & Letter Sounds: These measures tap the initial skills that take students on their first steps toward word reading. The assessment will assess accuracy and response times while providing teachers with information about student letter name and sound recognition for the full alphabet.
- Word Decoding: This assessment will tap whether the student can take the sounds of a word and identify the whole word by reading various patterns at a variety of gradually increasing difficulty levels. Those patterns initially include consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and CVVC patterns, through to those that include diphthongs, digraphs, and more complex combinations of phonics skills. The measure will be sensitive to growth across a broad span of grades.
- Word Encoding: Teachers want to know how well students can spell. This measure was designed to help teachers determine students’ orthographic knowledge—an initial step toward skill development of automated word reading and production and automaticity. This online assessment will determine whether students can identify the correctly spelled word among a group of pseudo-homophones quickly and accurately.
- Word Identification: This new assessment will help teachers determine students’ automated word reading skills. It will involve the first 100, 300, 1000 and higher levels of high frequency words. This makes it ideal for assessing students across a broad span of grade levels.
We will have more to come soon from FastBridge Learning, so be sure to check back. Want to learn more about how FastBridge Learning can partner with your district? Request a demo or talk to a sales specialist today!
