Thanks so much for asking. Your school district’s Renaissance hosted site account master will select your district’s unique standard preference. Some states, such as Texas, use the Texas TEKS, while others, such as Virginia, use the Virginia SOLs, and many use the Common Core. Renaissance Learning also has a standard preference that uses skills from our Core Progress learning progressions.

At the start of the school year, teachers are able to view new and incoming students’ test histories by scaled score. In the past there has not been a feature to view historical information on standards, but that is a terrific idea that we can add to our list to consider for future product development. We suggest you use STAR to assess your students within the first weeks of school, and use the standards report produced after that testing to inform your instruction. This will provide the most current and accurate information possible for those students.

Customers will be able to view the new learning progressions once they are completed and rolled out starting on August 4. The actual date of availability will vary a little by state.

Thank you for taking time to connect with us.

First, growing the skills-aligned resources in the STAR assessments is a high priority for our Content Development team. We now have more than 20,000 resources to support targeted instruction. In addition, we have a number of enhancements planned for release during the back-to-school time frame this fall. One of these is that we are working with additional vendors to identify, curate, and align third-party instructional resources to the learning progressions in order to make them available to our customers directly in STAR. As a result, this fall you’ll be able to easily find a much greater variety of useful, powerful, and appropriate targeted resources to support your teaching.

To your point about managing the number of standards (or skills) STAR is identifying across all of your students, it may be worth exploring the flexible grouping feature in STAR’s Record Book. This will allow you to easily create groups of similarly performing students for instruction and progress monitoring. The groups can also be changed as needed to reflect student or teacher needs. If you have any questions on how to do this, just contact customer support, and we’ll walk you through it.

I hope this helps!

What I wish could be better is when I enter the learning progression. As much as I would like to use it, it is overwhelming to find twenty to thirty standards that each student needs to work on “next”, and to have to organize that for 120 students. Yes, there are resources available for teaching specific skills, but the resources are paltry at best. Many of the resources repeat through the different standards. In addition, there is no easy way to assign the resources to students so that they can work on areas needing improvement. As a result of this weakness in the program, I am having to use other sites, such as Mobymax and Study Island, to assign specific learning activities for my students. This means they have to take yet another assessment test to find out specific skills that they need to work on.

I would love to have the ability to see standards that one student or a pair of students need to work on, and to be able to assign, or have Renaissance automatically assign, specific web-based study sessions. A lot to ask for, I know, but definitely an improvement to the current program.