FASTtrack Reading Overview

FASTtrack Reading provides teachers with easy access to the recommended reading screening assessments for each grade level. FASTtrack Reading includes specific assessments that students complete three times a year for universal screening. FastBridge has pre-selected the specific assessments to use based on their capacity to predict future student reading performance and indicate what type of reading instruction is needed now. After students complete both the specific and general reading assessments, the teacher can view the scores and see recommended reading instruction plans using the Screening to Intervention Report for Reading (s2i-R). At this time FASTtrack Reading is available in English only.  The table below lists the assessments included in FASTtrack Reading at each grade level:

Accessing FASTtrack Reading

Teachers access FASTtrack Reading from the teacher Screening tab on the left menu. 

Note that FASTtrack Reading is automatically turned on for all accounts and can be turned off by the District Manager.  For information on how to disable FASTtrack Reading, please review this Knowledge Base article.  

FASTtrack Reading Assessments

FASTtrack Reading includes specific assessments of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, and general reading. The following assessments measure these skills for each skill area, grade level, and season:

What does Each Assessment Include?

Each of the FASTtrack Reading assessments is designed to provide information about the selected reading skills so that teachers can develop instruction best-match to all students’ needs. Some of the assessments are teacher-administered (TA) and others are computer-based (CB). Here are descriptions of the assessments and how they measure reading skills.

• Teacher-Administered Assessments:
• earlyReading English - Onset Sounds: The teacher presents the student with pictures of familiar items and says their names. The student identifies the correct picture or sound.
• earlyReading English - Letter Sounds: The teacher presents the student with a page of all lower-case letters and the student says their corresponding most common sounds.
• earlyReading English - Word Segmenting: The teacher says short whole words out loud and the students says the individual sounds in each word.
• earlyReading English - Sentence Reading: The teacher presents the student with an illustrated short story, one sentence at a time. The student reads the story out loud.
• earlyReading English Composite: In addition to the above earlyReading subtests, the student completes two additional subtests per screening period. The combined weighted scores from all 4 subtests create the Composite score and indicate the student’s overall early reading skills. See below for a summary of Composite subtests.
• CBMreading English: The student reads three brief stories out loud while the teacher records any errors.  

*Nonsense Words is the default subtest; Decodable Words can be substituted for Nonsense Words.

• Computer-Based Assessments:
• aReading: The student completes 30 multiple-choice questions related to all reading skills, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. aReading is a computer-adaptive test (CAT) and after completing several items at grade level on the first administration, the FastBridge system presents easier or harder items based on the student’s answers to the preceding ones.
• AUTOreading: After a warm-up subtest that teaches the student how to respond to items, computer audio presents a letter or word and the student selects the correct choice from three options. The AUTOreading subtests given as part of FASTtrack Reading differ by grade level as shown in the table below:

FASTtrack Report

The primary FastBridge report that provides details from FASTtrack Reading assessment is the Screening to Intervention Report for Reading (s2i-R). This report includes both class-wide and student-specific instructional recommendations. The recommendations are linked as Instruction Plans which indicate specific types of instruction and interventions to use. More information about the s2i-R can be found in this article.