Pointerpro vs. Renaissance Star Assessments

They get the job done. We were able to do everything that our client wanted and needed. Its a free quiz on their website, so having to pay $1,500 a year for this service is hurting our bank. My only complaint is the price. If you are able to lower your price or offer promotions, then I would have no problem staying. We are currently looking for cheaper alternatives.

Incentivized

Many of my students reach the 852 score and are eligible to take the Star Reading test in the Spring. This is due to the reports telling me which skills to work on and being able to group students according to skill needs. When I need teacher assistance, online meetings with Renaissance support personnel has been available. Renaissance always welcomes teacher feedback to improve their products. The company has acquired many classroom tools in the last years and connected them fir ease of teacher use, which saves classroom time.

Incentivized

• Intuitive branching logic mechanics. Survey Anyplace offers a nicely pipeline/process map format to visually see the branching logic for more robust question sets.
• Reliable results. Survey Anyplace offers important tracking data to evaluate and hold respondents accountable to completing the surveys.
• Users can save progress and come back. This allows busy respondents time to think about deeper questions, specifically when the surveys are being used in an interviewing approach.

Incentivized

• Renaissance Star Assessments gives me a look at each student as an overall reader.
• Renaissance Star Assessments shows me the areas of which my students are struggling.
• Renaissance Star Assessments is linked with Nearpod, so I can assign lessons based on what each student needs.
• Star CBM helps me see whether my students' fluency is improving or not.

Incentivized

• Creating something highly customized at the ReportR level means you will need to have some savvy with CSS if you want to do it yourself. But it also means you can create something truly incredible and they do not have the same limitations as other similar software.

• The graphs for each subject are not consistently the same. (ie. some graphs are by 5s and some are by 50s.) It's very confusing to read them.
• The questions are not rigorous enough for state standards.
• Different reports will show data that does not align. If 'state' is chosen, then all reports should show the same data. The Parent Report will show the child in 'green', but every sub-skill is in 'red'. That is super confusing for parents and teachers.
• All reports should be based on the same score, but they are not. It is like comparing apples to oranges on the same child.

Incentivized

I give it this rating because it is an essential program in our school. We set up reading groups throug( the Star assessment. We set goals based on the assessment. Students comfort zones are based on the zpd data in Star. We track students progress through the data found in Star.

This is a great platform. The ease of use and ability to generate instant reports is killer. I highly recommend this platform for those who want to showcase a professional survey to impress their clients and employees. For us, this helps expand our product offering greatly, which also supplements our other services. [Survey Anyplace is a] great product and platform!

Incentivized

I love the idea that it takes only a short period of time for the students to be able to take the quizzes and obtain results. I appreciative how quickly the teacher has plans on implementation in her/his hands as soon as the class has completed the quiz.

It’s wonderful

I absolutely love this program

Incentivized

I wish there was a better live chat feature. Seems like I have to wait 30-60 every time I need to talk to someone. Though once I am able to speak with someone via the chat in my account, they have been very helpful in answering my questions or pointing me in the right direction.

Incentivized

After using the product for multiple years, I am very pleased with the assessment administration and report options. I use STAR Assessment data regularly and review the different reports to guide instruction. There are many different report options to help meet the needs of the teacher and student. STAR Assessments are a valuable assessment tool for the classroom

Incentivized

I just feel this way.

When presenters show us how to use the program they need to have a full class size of data. During training, there were only 5 or 6 sample students. Classes are more like 25 and that makes the training more realistic to have similar data to what we will use.

Survey Anyplace is an excellent piece of software.

It can create in depth surveys and has a huge functional capability! I would highly recommend using Survey Anyplace for any business as it is so adaptable!

The support team are fabulous and always on hand to answer any queries and set up Zoom calls for more tailored help! Mark has been brilliant in helping me to create a complex survey!

Incentivized

Renaissance Star Math Assessment provided a proven data collection tool. This was also being used at the lower grades in our district, so it made sense to continue with its use to provide a more reliable and accurate picture of our students entering the middle school. The continuation of the data trail should continue to help their overall growth.

Incentivized

Great overall program with lots of advice in implementation

Incentivized

• As a publisher, the quizzes provide us with compelling type of "advertising" product to engage our clients' audiences.
• We use the quizzes to direct respondents to thought leadership content for lead gen. The "correct response" feature in the quizzes provide the most interesting sample of our clients' content.

Incentivized

• It has positively impacted student time to learn by reducing testing times and allowing more time for instruction
• The reduced testing time also positively impacted our schools by freeing the computer labs and making the planning and creation of testing schedules easier. This has allowed more computer lab use for education and learning.
• It has negatively impacted the time and effort required by support staff, administrators, and some teachers by requiring more time spent on looking up results or going to multiple spots and manually combining results because a larger group couldn't easily be made.
• Another negative impact on our district is that it has also taxed those few educators with more technical ability and data knowledge moreso than other programs. The need to create/summarize/write programs to deal with full, raw data export files since the smaller, more specific reports and summaries are not downloadable into a format that can be manipulated easily (pdf only, not csv exports), and to constantly back up data exports and to have to search through them when the State wants results on past students etc.