Note: This assessment requires the sound to be on.
Fast™ Comprehension Efficiency
was designed to measure the quality and efficiency of the comprehension processes that occur during reading and the qualities of the comprehension product that is left after reading. Note that COMPefficiency is currently part of the FastBridge Research Lab. It is available to users to try out, however it does not have complete benchmarks and norms and not all reports are available at this time.
- The processes that occur during reading include monitoring, self-regulation, and inferencing. These processes help construct a mental representation that integrates new information from the text and connects it with prior knowledge.
- The product of reading comprehension is the mental representation that is left over after reading is done.
Reading Passages: Screening passages are unique for each screening period and for each grade. Screening passages for grades 2 through 4 are narrative; screening passages for grades 5 through 8 are informational. For progress monitoring, passages alternate between narrative and informational.
Procedure: This is a self-paced measure that is computer-administered and computer-scored. On average, it takes 7 to 12 minutes to complete. Students read a passage of 250 to 500 words sentence-by-sentence. Here are examples of the first sentences in a story. The student reads the sentence and then clicks on the green arrow to advance.
The student is interrupted three to four times per story to answer true or false questions, which are designed to measure the comprehension processes (e.g., summarizing, connecting, bridging, elaborating). Here is an example of a true/false question for this story.
After they complete the reading, they also respond to multiple-choice questions, which are designed to measure the student’s overall understanding of the story or informational passage.
Scoring: At this time COMPefficiency scores show the student’s accuracy on all questions. Additional research is underway to develop sub-scores by comprehension type, which describe the quality of the student’s mental representation of the story in terms of different comprehension levels as follows:
- Text-to-Text (low inference): paraphrase - the student's ability to comprehend paraphrased information from the passage
- Text-to-Passage (moderate inference): connecting inference - the student's ability to connect information from different parts of the passage
- Text-to-Knowledge (high inference): elaborative inference - the student's ability to connect information from the passage to prior knowledge
- Combined Text-to-Text + Text-to-Passage: Combination of text-to-text and text-to-passage. The student’s ability to comprehend and connect information from the passage, leaving out prior knowledge.
Scores: The score is the student’s overall accuracy percentage on the true/false and multiple-choice questions.
Standards: COMPefficiency was built based on Common Core State Standards, Reading: Literature (RL) and Reading: Informational Text (RI)
RL.2.1 & RI.2.1
RL.3.1 & RI.3.1
RL.4.1 & RI.4.1
RL.5.1 & RI.5.1
RL.6.1 & RI.6.1
RL.7.1 & RI.7.1
RL.8.1 & RI.8.1