STAR Overview
What are the 3 STAR assessments?
Early Literacy, Reading, and Math
What grades should take each assessment during the testing window?
Early Literacy - Grades K-2
Reading and Math - Grades 1-8
When are STAR results available?
STAR results are available immediately with the exception of Student Growth Percentile (SGP), which is available after 24 hrs.
Which reports are needed to complete the DSJ data analysis template?
The Screening Report and the Growth Report
What is the purpose of STAR?
To provide schools, parents, and students with data to support student learning.
In particular, STAR provides universal screening (to determine the extent to which students are on track for college readiness) and shows the general impact of instruction and intervention.
Which assessment uses audio (headphones)?
Early Literacy always uses headphones.
Math is possible to use headphones if a student has a low reading fluency.
Reading never uses headphones.
What is the difference between norm- and criterion-referenced data?
Norm-referenced data is used to compare each student with respect to the achievement of others (the norming group) in broad areas of knowledge.
Criterion-referenced data is used to determine whether each student has mastered specific skills or concepts (criterion).
What information is provided on the Diagnostic Report that is not available on the Screening (or Parent) Report?
The Diagnostic Report also includes Domain Scores. These scores estimate the percent of grade-level skills a student has likely mastered within each domain.
It also indicates how long the student took to complete the assessment.
What is computer adaptive testing (CAT)?
CAT is a method of assessment that adapts to a student's ability level. CAT is able to identify a student's level of ability by increasing/decreasing the level of difficulty of items based on each response.
When can test questions or answer choices be read aloud to students?
Never.
Reading questions/responses aloud invalidates the data. Explaining words/questions/responses also invalidates the data.
What is the raw score named in STAR? This score is used to determine all other scores.
Scaled Score (SS)
On the Parent Report, what does PR Range indicate?
Percentile Rank (PR) Range indicates that if a student had taken this assessment multiple times at this time of year, most of his/her scores would likely have fallen in this range.
Approximately how long does it take to administer a STAR assessment?
15-20 minutes
However, students have up to 43.5 min in Reading and 102 minutes in Math. It is helpful to keep these time amounts in mind when developing your testing schedule.
Where do I go to add, delete, or edit students?
PowerSchool
Through RDI (Renaissance Data Integration), the data in PowerSchool is automatically uploaded to Renaissance every 24 hours. Any students entered directly into Renaissance will be deleted each day when the integration takes place.
What is the difference between Percentile Rank (PR) and Student Growth Percentile (SGP)?
PR compares a student’s performance to others students in the same grade nationally.
SGP compares a student’s growth to that if his/her academic peers nationally.
Why do we have 4 testing windows?
Students need to take at least 3 assessments before they can receive a trend line to most accurately predict performance by the end of the year.
A common misconception about STAR is that it can provide accurate skill-level data. How would you clarify this misconception?
STAR is designed to measure general math and reading ability. Though it uses the learning progression to predict skill-level mastery, this is a broad prediction and is most beneficial to use when identifying possible foundational gaps for a student in urgent intervention. Even in this case, an additional diagnostic assessment to pinpoint specific focus skills is recommended.
What is the purpose of the monitor password?
The monitor password is used to verify that the correct student is logged on before taking a test. It is also required to stop or resume a test.
The default monitor password is "admin". This password should not be given out to students.
Why is the diocesan benchmark set at 65 PR and 65 SGP?
65 PR corresponds to the minimum PR that represents being on track for high school and college readiness.
65 SGP corresponds to the minimum SGP that represents above average growth.
When should a STAR report be deactivated?
Only when a student mistakenly logs into another student's account.
Appropriate use of the monitor password should prevent this from happening.