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STAR Screening - Understanding the Parent Report

Renaissance STAR assessments are reading and math screening tests that are given three times per year to all students in grades 1-8, and are given twice per year to students in Kindergarten, beginning in the winter of their Kindergarten year.  In Reading, students will take one of two versions of the STAR test:  STAR Reading or STAR Early Literacy.  The results are used, along with many other pieces of information about each student, to ensure appropriate plans are in place to meet each child’s academic needs.  

During a STAR test, which typically takes 20-30 minutes to complete, students answer a series of questions.  Since these tests are “computer adaptive”, the questions each child is asked are customized and will vary based upon their grade level and their response pattern.  If a student answers a question correctly, the next question will be more complex.  If a student answers a question incorrectly, the next question will be simpler.

STAR tests are nationally normed, meaning each student’s score can be compared to scores from a large national pool of students in their same grade.  It is important to remember that STAR tests capture a moment in time, and are just one of many ways student progress and growth are measured and evaluated.

Sample Student STAR Report
Sample STAR Report

The STAR Parent Report provides the following information:

Scaled Score

The first score on the Parent Report is the student’s Scaled Score.  This is a raw score that reflects the total points a child scored.  The Scaled Score is derived from the difficulty of the questions and the number of correct responses.  All students score somewhere between 600-1400 on the scale.  

Scaled Scores are useful for comparing student performance over time and across grades.  We use it as one way to evaluate student growth and to look for trends such as “Summer slide”.

Percentile Rank

The second score on the Parent Report is the Percentile Rank.  Your child’s Percentile Rank represents the percent of students from the grade level national norming pool whom your child performed better than. The 25th to 75th percentile range encompasses the bulk of students’ Scaled Scores nationally, and is referred to as the “average” range.  

Your child’s Percentile Rank is represented by a diamond at the top of the Parent Report.  You will see a line extending out from each side of this diamond.  This line represents the range of scores that could be expected if your child were to take the test many times in one screening period.  Since no test is “perfect”, a range of possible scores is expected in any assessment measure.