About FAST-R
Using FAST-R
FAST-R in Context
What is FAST-R?
FAST-R, the Formative Assessments of Student Thinking in Reading, are short, low-stakes assessments that provide information on students’ strengths and weaknesses in two English/Language Arts (ELA) areas: finding evidence and making inferences. These two skills are thoroughly assessed on MCAS ELA and are essential for successful reading at every grade level and in any content area.
More than fifty FAST-R assessments have been created for grades 2-12. Each contains a passage followed by ten multiple-choice questions that assess students’ close reading and inferential thinking skills. [See sample assessment] The passages reflect a variety of genres, styles, and authors; some have been used on MCAS while others were selected because they were particularly rich, high-interest, accessible, or challenging. Each question set comes with a scoring guide designed to help teachers analyze the intellectual work readers must do to comprehend the passage, understand what students may have been thinking as they chose correct or incorrect answer choices, and begin planning instruction in response. After administering a FAST-R assessment, teachers receive a variety of user-friendly data reports.
Ultimately, FAST-R is a means to help build a data-driven culture in schools, one in which everyone shares a sense of responsibility for students’ progress. To support that transformation, BPE provides professional development in the form of on-site instructional data coaching to help teacher teams work with existing resources—such as literacy coaches or special education experts—to give students feedback and plan instructional responses to the insights they gain from the data.
FAST-R is based on the belief that having timely, nuanced, user-friendly data about students’ reading and thinking skills is necessary, but not sufficient, to improve student achievement: It’s not the data itself, but what teachers actually do with it, that makes a difference for students’ learning. Therefore, the professional development provided to teams using FAST-R aims to help teachers build students’ skills at reading texts closely and thoughtfully, since those skills are critical for lifelong reading success.
What do you mean by “formative” assessment?
We use “formative assessments” to mean those which are used to guide next steps for teaching and learning. In that way, formative assessments serve as an assessment for learning, rather than assessment of learning. Unlike summative assessments that are administered at the end of a unit, course, or school year to judge student performance in relation to a benchmark, formative assessments often occur in the midst of day-to-day instruction. “An assessment is formative to the extent that information from the assessment is used to adjust instruction with the intent of better meeting student learning needs,” according to assessment expert Dylan Wiliam; therefore, unless the results actually guide instruction, an assessment is not being used formatively.
The FAST-R tools and support are designed to make it as easy as possible for teachers to actually use the results to guide their next steps in the classroom. See our glossary for more detail on how we distinguish between diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments.
What types of reading and thinking does FAST-R assess?
FAST-R assesses two primary ways that readers construct understanding as they read: finding evidence to determine explicit meaning in the text, and making inferences to determine implicit meaning in the text. This handout represents how these skills build on one another as readers answer questions of increasing sophistication. FAST-R Teacher Guides and data reports annotate each question to highlight the level of thinking that question assesses. See our glossary for more detail.
How does FAST-R support BPS priorities?
“Examine student work and data to drive instruction and professional development” has long been one of the essential activities at the core of Boston’s reform; FAST-R helps schools do it. Also, the practice of on-going, formative assessment of students’ thinking is at the heart of Boston’s approach to instruction, workshop, which emphasizes strategic planning in response to identified student strengths and needs. Education Matters, the district’s independent evaluator, concluded its study of the FAST-R pilot year by stating,
“The process engendered by [FAST-R] is consistent with the teaching/learning process explicitly promoted in the district’s math and literacy programs. … [FAST-R] can make a strong contribution to improving teaching and learning across the district.”
This consonance is not by coincidence, but by design. FAST-R is designed to promote the underlying principles of Boston’s Whole-School Improvement reform: the importance of learning together, making practice public, and understanding individual students in order to teach them better.
Specifically, the goals and objectives that guide our work with teachers are aligned with the BPS Dimensions of Effective Teaching in the areas of “Plan Instruction and Use Strategies Effectively” and “Monitor and Assess Student Progress.” Further, our instructional data coaches collaborate with literacy coaches to tailor their work with teacher teams to support the district’s instructional priorities and integrate with curriculum resources such as America’s Choice and Making Meaning.
How did FAST-R get started?
Since 1997, BPS teachers and school leaders have been charged with examining student work and data and using them to plan instruction. In 2003, amid this increasing attention to data, a group of principals and headmasters identified a missing link: Teachers need an assessment tool that yields timely formative information about students’ performance on particular reading and thinking skills. In response, Superintendent Payzant asked BPE and these schools to create and pilot assessments to meet this need. In December 2003, nearly 20 schools began a tryout. Since then, with funding from the Hewlett Foundation, FAST-R has been continuously refined and revised to respond to recommendations from school users and independent evaluator Education Matters, Inc., [link to evaluations]
How is FAST-R different from other assessments available to BPS teachers?
The most significant difference is that FAST-R is intended solely as a tool to help teachers understand their students as readers and thinkers so they can teach responsively. In addition, FAST-R’s not just an assessment—it comes with a full array of support to help teachers collect, interpret, and use data to guide their instruction.
- FAST-R is not mandated by the district, scores are not reported to the central office, and data is not used to measure school progress
- FAST-R is used voluntarily by teacher teams who, with help from an “instructional data coach,” plan when and how to administer it, analyze the data together, and plan instruction in response
- FAST-R is designed as a formative assessment: administered during the school year and scored quickly so that teachers can adjust instruction immediately
- FAST-R can be administered and analyzed in many different ways: There are no fixed rules about when or how to use it, so each teacher team designs a plan to meet its own needs and goals for learning about its students
- FAST-R isn’t just about data: The analyses are designed to help teachers gain insights about how students are thinking as they read and what to teach them next
How do teachers use FAST-R in flexible ways?
Because FAST-R is intended to be an assessment for learning, there’s no set way that FAST-R sets are “supposed to be” administered. Rather, teachers are encouraged to consider what they wish to learn about their students and to use the components of FAST-R (including the passage text, the question stems, the multiple-choice answers, the ideas for connected writing activities, and the data reports) in ways that will help them in that inquiry. Teachers may choose to vary the content, the process, or the product for individual students or for groups of students, depending on what they know and want to learn about their students.
Content: Match FAST-R passages to students strategically. For instance, use a high-interest passage such as Monster to assess the effect of students’ motivation on their comprehension; use texts that deliver sophisticated ideas in accessible text (e.g., A Dream Begins to Grow, Eleven, Duke Ellington) to assess the thinking students do as they read.
Process: Ask students to read and annotate the text thoughtfully before giving them the questions; for many students, really engaging with the text as a text before entering their “testing mode” seems to help comprehension.
Product: Withhold the multiple choice answers and ask students to answer each question in their own words first. Then, have them match their answers with one of the multiple choice options. Read a vignette about a teacher who used this process to learn about one of her students.
How does FAST-R support differentiated instruction in the classroom?
Differentiated instruction is a teaching philosophy that embraces the idea that varied learners should be taught in varied ways in order to maximize each student’s learning potential. Experts on differentiated instruction have found that a teacher can differentiate three aspects of their curriculum: content, product, and process. FAST-R can support differentiation in all three areas.
Content refers to the concepts and big ideas that students are exposed to. No matter what the learning level, students should all be exposed to the same important ideas. Because there are over fifty different FAST-R passages, teachers can access relevant “content” at various learning levels. There are poetry passages that span grade levels, themes that cut across genres and grade levels, and aspects of text that vary in degree of difficulty across all passages.
Process involves how teachers help students come to “own” these big ideas and skills being taught. FAST-R can suggest how students might be grouped for certain tasks, how collaboration might be configured, and which lessons would be best to do for the whole class versus small groups versus individual kids. FAST-R itself can be administered in various ways with a variety of accommodations at the discretion of the teacher. The teacher can elect to read the passage aloud for some struggling readers, have others annotate in particular ways, or require that still others use a graphic organizer or employ a story map to complete FAST-R.
Product refers to how students demonstrate that they have learned the ideas and skills you have been trying to teach. FAST-R can support a teacher differentiating the “products” in the curriculum by providing extended writing activities and research connections for extending the learning beyond the FAST-R passage. A teacher can also choose to assign various components of a FAST-R passage to students based on readiness or interest level.
How can FAST-R be used with advanced readers?
With over fifty FAST-R passages/question sets to choose from, teachers should feel free to select more advanced texts for their more advanced readers. Because each passage is categorized according to recommended grade levels, genre, and most challenging aspects of text, teachers can easily choose a passage that fits best with their own instructional plan for advanced readers.
How can FAST-R be used with ELL students?
FAST-R is most effectively used with intermediate or advanced level ELD learners. Because FAST-R is intended to give insight into the thinking students do as they read, teachers should apply whatever modifications and adjustments they feel are necessary to ensure that students have access to the text. These modifications might include giving the students an overview of the text they are about to read, pre-teaching key vocabulary, or reading the passage aloud to students. Teachers can also elect to have kids use dictionaries or consult a partner while answering the FAST-R questions.
When previewing and selecting passages, teachers should pay particular attention to the “aspects of text” sliders on the top right-hand corner of each teacher guide; these sliders give a snapshot of the degree to which each passage is supportive or challenging in each area (the call-out boxes provide more detail). For example, a passage such as “Teeth” (nonfiction, G4-5) supports struggling readers with lots of diagrams and captioned photos, while “Eleven” (realistic fiction G6-9) contains repetition of ideas and phrases. A number of passages are grounded in Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and East Asian cultures which may allow some students to better relate to and understand content matter and themes.
How can FAST-R be used with special education students?
Because FAST-R is intended to give insight into the thinking students do as they read, it is ideal for use with students with disabilities. Teachers should apply whatever modifications and adjustments they feel are necessary to ensure that students have access to the text. For instance, teachers may adjust and adapt how they administer FAST-R, and they may enhance the tasks that go along with the question sets to find out specific information on specific learners. FAST-R is also short, thus supporting the collection of accurate data from students who often have not yet developed the stamina to successfully complete longer assessments.
How can FAST-R help prepare high school students for college-level reading and writing?
FAST-R how includes question sets based on passages that have appeared on the Advanced Placement (AP) exams, as well on excerpts from very challenging works of literature by authors such as Shakespeare, Browning, Shakur, O’Brien, Jen, and others. Such texts are commonly studied at the 11th and 12th grade and first-year college levels. Each passage is accompanied by a list of suggested writing ideas so that teachers may gauge both the reading and the writing abilities of students using these passages. Questions on these sets are appropriately challenging for older and more advanced students, yet like those on all FAST-R question sets, are designed to reveal patterns of student thinking.
How do teachers use what they learn about their students?
- FAST-R data reports are organized in such a way that teachers can quickly spot patterns to address through whole-group, small-group, and one-on-one instruction.
- FAST-R helps teachers talk with students about specific patterns and reading behaviors, and many teachers report that their students value conversations with their teachers about FAST-R as source of feedback on how they can become better readers.
I’m a busy teacher. How much time will this take?
We know how busy teachers are, and design FAST-R to make the most of your time. Teachers generally report that their students complete a FAST-R assessment in a 45-60 minute class period (or less). FAST-R data entry is handled by BPE staff, not school staff, and most teacher teams get their data reports one week after FAST-R is administered. The data reports are designed to be user-friendly, with questions appearing right next to the graphs of student results, so that teachers can spend their limited time together interpreting the data and planning instruction in response.
Who can use FAST-R?
FAST-R can be used in grades 2-12 with regular education students, with students with disabilities, and with English language learners.
At this time, due to resource constraints, FAST-R is only available to teachers in Boston Public Schools that have applied. But that may change in the future, so contact us if you’re interested.
What research underlies this work?
The FAST-R tools and approach has been influenced by research in the fields of differentiated instruction, the workshop approach to literacy instruction, and formative assessment.
Formative Assessment
Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe’s Educative Assessment and Understanding By Design
Higher-Order Thinking Skills
The FAST-R levels of thinking are influenced by the recent Marzano model of domains of thinking and the Northwest Labs model of thinking skills, both of which are adaptations of the original Bloom’s taxonomy. These models apply to a wide variety of thinking tasks, but we have tailored the FAST-R levels of thinking to reflect the higher-order thinking students do as they read and interact with texts.
Differentiated Instruction
Carol Ann Tomlinson
How is FAST-R related to the state MCAS tests?
FAST-R is not an MCAS prep program, although it assesses two important reading skills needed for MCAS and it is presented in a multiple-choice format that can help familiarize students with the test style. Both FAST-R and MCAS include questions to assess the higher-order thinking students do as they read. In addition, FAST-R reading passages and some questions are drawn from reading and English language arts MCAS tests (as well as from AP tests, magazines, newspapers, and books).
Does FAST-R get results?
Education Matters, Inc.’s qualitative evaluations of FAST-R and BPE’s annual surveys of teacher users have collected compelling evidence that teachers find the FAST-R data more useful than existing assessment results and that teachers are making good use of the assessments, having sustained discussions about their students’ performance data, and are working to translate those insights into changed instruction. Over time, with guidance from their principals and literacy coaches, we hypothesize that teachers’ increased capacity to use data will result in more rigorous, more individualized instruction that will, in turn, increase student learning and performance.
To test that theory of action, the Hewlett Foundation (a primary funder of FAST-R) has engaged MDRC, a well-respected nonprofit research organization, to undertake a quantitative analysis of the effects of FAST-R use on students’ reading achievement. That study will result in a final report in spring 2008.
Finally, using FAST-R has given teachers a sense that their collective effort can lead to improvement in their students’ learning: At one BPS middle school that used the results of the assessments to guide their professional development and taught specific strategies in response to what they learned, the percentage of students scoring at the proficient level rose nearly thirty points in one year to 58%, with 96% passing. While acknowledging that no single practice leads to improvements of that magnitude, the literacy coach and teachers at the school believe that FAST-R helped them focus their professional work last year, and that that hard work paid off for their students.
