Excerpt from: Florida Assessment for Instruction in Reading Technical Manual 2009-2010 Edition, State of Florida Department of Education, 2009

Florida Assessment for Reading Instruction (FAIR)

Overall Purpose of the FAIR System

The Florida Assessment for Instruction in Reading (FAIR) system contains a set of assessments that have been designed to help guide reading instruction for students in the State of Florida. These are not summative tests, and are not intended to replace or supplement the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), which remains the sole reading assessment providing data for Florida’s school and student accountability system. Rather, the purpose of these tests is to provide data at the beginning and throughout the school year for use by teachers, schools, and district leaders to strengthen instruction for all students, but particularly for students who may struggle to meet grade level standards in reading. The kindergarten through grade 2 part of the FAIR system is described in a separate technical manual and preschool assessments in the FAIR system are currently under development. This technical manual provides information about the conceptual structure and proposed uses of the tests included in the 3-12 system. It also provides initial information about the development of the assessment tasks and their reliability and validity for specific purposes.

How FAIR Works

Florida students in grades 3-12 self-administer the Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR). But, in grades K-2 teachers must administer the assessments individually to their students 3 times a year.

Description of the Assessments in the FAIR System grades K-2

There are four types of assessments in FAIR for K-2:

  1. the Broad Screen/Progress Monitoring Tool given to all students in 3-5 min.
  2. the Broad Diagnostic Inventory, which includes comprehension and vocabulary tasks
  3. the Targeted Diagnostic Inventory
  4. Ongoing Progress Monitoring Broad Screen/Progress Monitoring

Broad Screen

In kindergarten, the broad screen contains measures of letter-name knowledge, letter-sound knowledge,phonological awareness, and word reading. Grades 1 and 2 both involve word reading tasks, with the grade 1 task as time unlimited, and grade 2 word reading being a timed test. The screen identifies students who are not likely to be successful on the end of year outcome test.

Broad Diagnostic Inventory

The diagnostic inventory tests for comprehension, expressive vocabulary and spelling, administered as a group test in grade 2. The comprehension task consists of explicit and implicit questions, story grammars and situation models that increase in difficulty over the grades.

Kindergarten students are tested for listening comprehension and grades 1 and 2 for reading comprehension. The reading comprehension task also includes scores for accuracy and fluency (i.e., words correct per minute). The expressive vocabulary task measures the breadth and depth of a student's vocabulary. The student is asked to label objects, actions, or attributes and is prompted in cases where an answer requires further precision. The spelling task in grade 2 assesses students' phonological and orthographic knowledge of words.

Targeted Diagnostic Inventory

The following assessments are administered according to grade level to pinpoint student difficulties:

  • Kindergarten: Optional Print Awareness, Letter Name and Sound Knowledge, Phoneme Blending and Phoneme Deletion, Letter-Sound Connections (Initial and Final), and Word Building tasks (initial and final consonants and medial vowels).
  • Grade 1: Letter-Sound Knowledge, Phoneme Blending Phoneme Deletion (initial and final), and Word Building tasks that progress from consonants and vowels to CVCe and blends.
  • Grade 2: The same Phoneme Deletion and Word Building tasks as those in the Grade 1 and a Multisyllabic Word Reading task.

Ongoing Progress Monitoring

Multiple probes from the Targeted Diagnostic Inventory are used for ongoing progress monitoring. In grades 1 and 2, monitoring includes equated, short passages for assessing oral reading fluency in one minute.

Description of the Assessments in the FAIR System grades 3-12

The FAIR system currently consists of three formal, computer-based tasks and a “toolkit” of various informal assessment tools. Following is a brief description of the formal assessment tasks:

  1. The Broad Screen/Progress Monitoring Tool assesses the type of complex reading comprehension that is measured by the FCAT. It is a computer-adaptive test that consists of passages that vary in genre, length, and difficulty across the grades in a pattern similar to the FCAT. It provides a score (FCAT Success Probability score) estimating the probability that a student will be successful when taking the FCAT reading test at the end of the school year. It can be used at the beginning of the year to identify students who may need special instructional supports or interventions, and can also be used during the year to estimate growth in reading ability in response to instruction.
  1. The Maze Task is one of two tasks that are part of the Targeted Diagnostic Inventory (TDI). It assesses the efficiency with which students can read grade-level text with a basic level of comprehension by selecting which of three words best complete cloze items embedded within the passage. It can be used to determine whether students with a relatively low probability of success on the FCAT (as determined by the Broad Screen tool) have difficulties with fundamental reading skills such as accuracy and fluency or basic text comprehension. It can also be used to monitor progress in text reading efficiency in struggling readers if they are receiving interventions focused on accuracy, fluency, and basic comprehension skills. In a recent comprehensive review of general outcome progress monitoring measures in reading, Wayman, Wallace, Wiley, Ticha, and Espin (2007) concluded that the maze test was the best format for monitoring growth of basic reading skills in middle and high school students.

3. The Word Analysis Task is also part of the TDI. It is a computer adaptive test of spelling that assesses student knowledge of the phonological, orthographic, or morphological information required to accurately identify words in text. If students have a relatively low probability of success on the FCAT, this test can provide information about the strength of their fundamental word reading skills. Like the Maze task, this task can also monitor student growth in the word level knowledge and skill required to accurately identify words in text.

Spelling was chosen as a method for assessing student knowledge in this domain because of constraints associated with computer delivery of the assessment, and because research has shown that students’ ability to spell words in a free-response format is strongly related to their ability to read. For example, Ehri (2000) found correlations between spelling and the ability to read words accurately that ranged from .68 to .86 across several studies. Students who are poor readers are almost always poor spellers (Treiman, 1998). However, the relationship between spelling and reading is asymmetric, with good readers able to read many more words than they can spell (Berninger, Abbot, Abbot, Graham, & Richards, 2002; Bosman & Van Orden, 1997) and it is not rare for students with good reading skills to remain relatively poor spellers. Because correct spelling requires precise knowledge of the phonological, orthographic, and morphological information in words, it provides a good general index of this kind of knowledge, and is particularly sensitive to the lack of this knowledge in students who struggle to read words accurately in print (Ehri, 2000, Trieman, 1998).

4. The Informal Diagnostic Toolkit. The tasks in the informal assessment toolkit are for use primarily by intervention teachers, but in some cases they can also be used by content area teachers to aid in day-to-day decision making in the classroom. They are not a substitute for classroom-based formative assessments which are often embedded within instruction and should be given on an ongoing basis, but they resemble these types of assessments in that their content can be tied very closely to classroom instructional objectives. These tasks are described below.

a. Phonics screening inventory. This tool is meant to be used by intensive intervention teachers with students who have scored very poorly on the Word Analysis task in the Targeted Diagnostic Inventory. It may be given to small groups or individually. There are two versions of this inventory: late elementary and middle/high school. Both inventories assess specific word knowledge necessary to decode and encode words (Henry, 2003; Moats, 2000). The late elementary inventory consists of letter-sound correspondences, orthographic, and syllable patterns typically mastered by grades 3-5. The middle/high school inventory contains more advanced orthographic patterns with the addition of prefixes, suffixes, and root words. Students are asked to spell 25 words per inventory, after listening to the teacher use the word in a sentence.

b. Academic word inventory. This includes lists of academic vocabulary words that occur with increasing frequency at each grade level to provide the teacher with an estimate of the student’s context-free word reading ability. Words were selected after careful review of FCAT content area vocabulary terms students are expected to know at their respective grade level and other academic content area vocabulary resources and word frequency guides (Fry & Kress, 2006; Marzano & Pickering, 2005; Taylor, Frackenpohl, White, Nieroroda, Browning, & Birsner, 1989; Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri, 1995). Word frequency was determined by the Standard Frequency Index (SFI) in Zeno et al. and words selected for the inventory ranged from 40.0-65.6. Each grade-level list contains 25 words. Teachers may opt to use a word list from any grade level depending on the student’s identified needs. It is to be used by intensive intervention teachers for students scoring low on the Maze task and/or the Word Analysis task.

c. Scaffolded discussion templates. This assessment provides a set of passages and word lists that can be used to assess comprehension with decoding skill controlled. Students are placed into a passage by reading a word list that has been empirically linked to 90% accuracy in reading the passage. The passages are accompanied by question-response templates that help teachers explore sources of comprehension errors when a student does not answer a question correctly and scaffold discussion to build understanding. These passages have also been empirically equated within grade level so they can be used to monitor progress in oral reading fluency if desired.

d. Lexiled passages to be read silently or orally for comprehension. This is simply an additional set of text passages that have been Lexiled for reading difficulty. The teacher can use them to provide extra opportunities to observe student’s oral reading skills. The teacher can use the Lexile® score a student obtains from the Broad Screen to match that student to text in the toolkit. In addition to using the passages to examine oral readingstrategies, teachers can assign students to work individually or in groups to discuss the questions associated with each passage or write responses.