The Science of Star The Research Foundation for:

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Star Assessments are designed to help teachers assess students quickly, accurately, and efficiently. Star provides teachers with reliable and valid data instantly so that they can target teaching, monitor progress, provide students with the most appropriate teaching and learning materials, and intervene with at-risk students. School leaders use real-time data from Star Assessments to make decisions about curriculum, assessment, and teaching at the classroom and school levels.

Three Star Assessments measure student achievement:

■ Star Early Literacy assesses early literacy

■ Star Reading assesses reading skills

■ Star Maths assesses maths skills

Star Early Literacy ‒ used for screening, progressmonitoring, and diagnostic assessment ‒ is a reliable, valid, and efficient, computer-adaptive assessment of 41 skills in critical early literacy domains. A Star Early Literacy assessment can be completed without teacher assistance in about 20-30 minutes by emergent readers. The assessment correlates highly with a wide range of more time-intensive assessments and serves as a skills diagnostic for older struggling readers.

Star Reading ‒ used for screening and progressmonitoring and diagnostic assessment ‒ is a reliable, valid, and efficient, computer adaptive assessment of general reading achievement and comprehension across all school years. Star Reading provides UK nationally norm-referenced reading scores and criterionreferenced scores. A Star Reading assessment can be completed without teacher assistance in about 20-30 minutes.

Star Maths ‒ used for screening, progress-monitoring, and diagnostic assessment ‒ is a reliable, valid, and efficient, computer-adaptive assessment of general maths achievement across all school years. Star Maths provides UK nationally norm-referenced maths scores and criterion-referenced evaluations of skill levels. A Star Maths assessment can be completed without teacher assistance in about 20-30 minutes.

All Renaissance Learning tools are designed to support our mission of ‘accelerating learning for all’. A key education principle supporting this mission is the notion that the initial step in accelerating learning is to measure its occurrence. Star Assessments do just that.

For more than thirty years, Renaissance Learning has supported a programme of continuous development, review, and technical investigation to ensure that Star Assessments provide robust, relevant, and powerful assessments in reading and maths for a wide range of educational practitioners. In the UK this has involved working with research institutions such as the National Foundation for Educational Research to align content and reporting to the most recent pedagogy and policy initiatives in the UK.

There is a reason why almost 38,000 schools worldwide use at least one Star assessment.

The Science of Star gives an overview of the most important technical aspects of Star Assessments: how the assessments continue to be developed, extended, and maintained; benefits of Computer Adaptive Testing and the associated statistical model of Item Response Theory; the assessments’ strengths in benchmarking attainment and particularly tracking progress; Star Assessments’ proven validity and reliability.

By producing this revised edition of the Science of Star, we aim to support understanding of the assessments and in turn the knowledge and confidence with which they are used.

John Moore Director ‒ UK Renaissance