Texas educators: What could you do with months of lead time to move students toward STAAR Spanish proficiency?  

We have recently completed a statistical study that links the results from Star Reading Spanish and Star Math Spanish to the end-of-year summative assessment State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness Spanish (STAAR Spanish) in reading and mathematics for grades 3 and 4. If you’re interested in learning more, read the full Technical Paper detailing the complete results of our linking study.   

This statistical linking helps you predict whether individual students are on track or need more assistance to experience success on the STAAR Spanish assessment. Teachers can identify early in the year students likely to miss reading and math yearly progress goals in time to make meaningful adjustments to instruction well before the year-end test. 

School and district administrators can use fall test scores to determine how many students are on track to meet the proficiency levels on the spring STAAR Spanish tests so they can reallocate resources where they’re needed most. This is especially valuable this year because summative testing was cancelled due to COVID and school closings. 

If you’re wondering what you can do to make use of this research, here are three steps: 

1.  Administer Star Reading Spanish and Star Math Spanish to your third and fourth graders early in the school year. Note that you can administer the assessments either in-school or remotely. 

2. Use the Appendix B on page 7 of the technical report to get a rough gauge of how Star Reading Spanish and Star Math Spanish percentile ranks compare to the cut-score equivalents on STAAR Spanish. 

3. Adjust instruction or redirect resources where needed to put all students on the pathway to proficiency.  

Here’s an example. A third-grade student takes Star Reading Spanish and receives a score of 77 PR. Looking at the Technical Report, you see the Star Reading Spanish percentile rank associated with “Meets Grade Level” is 75. This suggests that this student will have a good chance of meeting or exceeding that level on Texas STAAR Spanish Reading if they can stay at or above the 75 PR throughout the year on Star Reading Spanish.   

Renaissance is able to provide this kind of statistical linking with the cooperation of Texas school districts and the large quantity of Star Spanish tests that have been taken. Currently, the English versions of Star assessments are linked to summative tests for all 50 states, as well as the ACT and SAT. Linking for Star Spanish to other state summative tests will be available as we continue to partner with additional states to complete the research and our Star Spanish data-pool grows.