FAST ELA Grade 3 case studies
FAST ELA Grade 3 · Put your knowledge to work in context.
The FAST ELA Grade 3 assessment is Florida's statewide progress-monitoring test in English Language Arts, administered to third graders as part of the Florida Assessment of Student Thinking (FAST). It is a computer-based assessment built around reading passages followed by multiple-choice and technology-enhanced items, and it is used to gauge whether students are meeting grade-level expectations in reading. The FAST ELA Grade 3 case studies are 5 cases and about 1,866 words.
1The Two Versions of the Same Story
Okafor's third graders read two short texts about a girl who loses a tooth at the school fair. I felt like the whole fair had gone quiet." In Text B, told in third person, the text says, "Lena searched the grass for her tooth.
411 words, about 2 min2The Diagram and the Paragraph Disagree
A third-grade class is reading a short article about how beavers build dams. The article includes a paragraph saying beavers "pack mud and sticks into a river to slow the water." A simple diagram labels three parts: "sticks," "mud," and "pond behind dam." One student, Dani, reads the diagram label "pond behind dam" and writes in her notes, "Beavers build ponds first, then add a dam." The teacher also notices the diagram does not label the river at all.
383 words, about 2 min3"The Leaves Danced" - Too Much or Just Right?
During a poetry lesson, the class reads a four-line poem that includes the line "The leaves danced across the playground." The teacher asks what "danced" means here. Jayden says, "It means the leaves were alive and had feet." Amara says, "It means the leaves moved around a lot in the wind." The teacher then asks students to choose between two revisions of a sentence they are writing about a windy day: (1) "The wind blew hard" or (2) "The wind grabbed my hat and ran." Several students pick (1) because "it is more true." The teacher wants students to understand that figurative language can be accurate without being literal.
376 words, about 2 min4Two Texts, Two Structures
Students read two short texts about honeybees. Text 1 is a narrative about a girl who watches a bee land on her sandwich and stays very still until it flies away.
357 words, about 2 min5The Word That Looks Easy but Isn't
A third grader, Sofia, reads the sentence "The team was unbeaten all season." She reads it aloud correctly as "unbeaten" but then says it means "beaten a lot." When the teacher asks her to explain, Sofia says, "I know 'un' is a prefix, but 'beaten' is the main word, so I just used that." In the same session, she reads "reread" and "disagree" correctly. The teacher notices Sofia can identify prefixes but does not always use them to change meaning.
339 words, about 2 min