Renaissance Star Assessments vs. TalentSorter

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

TalentSorter is suitable for every sector, industry, or position any company is looking to recruit.

• 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

• We decided to have a few prior employees who were our best, and who remained the longest - ultimately a perfect fit for us, complete the TalentSorter questionaire. Both former employees scored very high and were spot on in meeting our unique criteria that TalentSorter allowed us to set up. That reverse approach really impressed us and also confirmed we had set our criteria correctly to help us sort through applicants. We now require all applicants go through TalentSorter before we will even look at their resume.
• TalentSorter took the five character traits that Fortune 500 companies deem most valuable and added many more to help us get a real sense of the individual. It allowed us to gain a much more complete image of the whole person, not just what they want to reveal in their resume, but what is revealed by the questions TalentSorter poses to them and are rated based on the criteria we select as priority.
• TalentSorter offers a unique approach to screening applicants using what they call "Predictive Human Analytics" its what we found to be a products that helps find a fit / match between employee and employer values and priorities - with the objective of increasing the quality of the work experience for all. Now that we did the favourite ex-employee test we are confident we will attract the right people and increase retention.
• Talent Sorter offers everything in one bucket with a dashboard that ranks best fit candidates, this really assisted our sorting where we focused mainly on the highest ranking candidates. And it captures resumes and ranks intelligence, provides a summary - its a genuine time saver and organizes all applicant material.
• As an side we discovered that TalentSorter works like a pre-screen for applicants. The very process eliminates "window shoppers" and the like, who are broadcasting their resume to any and all job postings without consideration.

• 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 am new to TalentSorter and still discovering all its incredible benefits to our recruitment process, so at this stage in time I have no criticism for improvement.

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.

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

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.

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

• 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.

• TalentSorter has reduced the number of inappropriate applicants. Im able to tailor each job posted.
• It scores and ranks applicants with the highest fit to our criteria.
• It helps me be better organized and serves as an excellent interview tool, affording me to ask deeper questions and explore where that individual is at and where they are headed.
• We are finding better suited individuals, where in the past we may have overlooked them because our sorting was based solely on resume content relevancy, now we are looking at people with the best fit and those who are a fit are happier, more engaged, find passion, pride and are easier to train and can take pride and find passion in their role.