Overview
What is Renaissance Star Assessments?
Star Assessments are a suite of assessments for reading, math, and early literacy, in both English and Spanish, boasting users among over 30,000 schools. Star Assessments helps educators to gain accurate insights into student learning, growth, and achievement—so they can…
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GREAT PRODUCT!!
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Star Assessment and Renaissance make Students, Teachers and Parents Partners in Literacy Success!
Renaissance Star Assessments is Out of This World
Great Tool
Renaissance STAR Assessments are easy to implement and give great information!
Renaissance Star Assessments is hands down the best!
Renaissance Star Assessments Review
Renaissance Star Assessments Are Great!
STAR Assessments Are Super!
My New Renaissance Star 360 Review
Your students can be stars with STAR Assessments!
Renaissance Star Assessments for Accessing Reading Levels
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Pricing
What is Renaissance Star Assessments?
Star Assessments are a suite of assessments for reading, math, and early literacy, in both English and Spanish, boasting users among over 30,000 schools. Star Assessments helps educators to gain accurate insights into student learning, growth, and achievement—so they can help all learners reach…
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Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Renaissance Star Assessments?
Renaissance Star Assessments Features
- Supported: Renaissance Star is supported by 93 scientific research studies and reviews on its reliability and validity.
- Supported: Student Growth Percentile (SGP) is Renaissance Star 360’s® measure for growth data, even as summative exams and benchmarks change. SGP gives a view of student growth over time by comparing a student’s previous test scores to current test scores, then measuring that growth alongside academic peers’ growth.
- Supported: Renaissance Mastery Model automates the tracking and reporting of student data from a wide variety of sources, and converts that data into a unified measure of mastery, helping educators make timely and informed decisions about all students’ learning.
- Supported: Renaissance Star Reading, Star Math, and Star Early Literacy are available in Spanish to help determine the best instruction to meet the needs of Spanish-speaking English Learners.
Renaissance Star Assessments Competitors
- FastBridge Learning
- NWEA MAP Suite
- Lexia PowerUp Literacy
- Scantron
- Pearson aimswebPlus
- MasteryConnect
- DIBELS Next
- Cognia (formerly Measured Progress and AdvancED)
Renaissance Star Assessments Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
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(94)Community Insights
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Valuable Information and Alignment: Many users have stated that Renaissance Star Assessments provide valuable information about students' reading levels and progress over time. They appreciate that the assessments are aligned well with what they are said to be measuring.
Adaptive Tests for Customized Assessment: The adaptive tests feature of Renaissance Star Assessments has been praised by users. It adjusts the difficulty level of questions based on students' performance, providing a customized assessment experience.
Integration and Tracking with Other Platforms: Users find the data synchronization feature of Renaissance Star Assessments with platforms like Freckle and Nearpod to be helpful. This allows for seamless integration and tracking of student performance, as well as assigning lessons tailored to each student's needs.
Missing Features: Several users have expressed their desire for various improvements to the software, including a live view of students testing and the ability to flag questions answered too quickly. Some users also want to see results without having to refresh the form and suggest a trend line starting from the second test. Additionally, users would like to share improvements or problems with students and have a breakdown of data by strand.
Difficult Navigation and Reports: Users have found it challenging to navigate the reports page and suggested a step-by-step manual to explain the data. Some users feel that it takes too many steps to get the desired report and want similar reports for Spanish as are provided in English. They also mention that different reports show inconsistent data, making it confusing for them. Furthermore, they find the graphs inconsistent and confusing to read.
Technical Issues: Many users have reported technical issues with the software, such as slow performance, frequent hang-ups, and difficulty creating PDFs or exporting data to Excel. Some users have experienced crashes that resulted in the loss of an entire class's results. These technical difficulties not only impact user experience but also hinder productivity when using the software.
Users commonly recommend the following regarding Renaissance Star Assessments:
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Periodically retaking the test to gather progress data: Users suggest regularly administering the assessments to monitor and track students' progress over time. By periodically retaking the test, educators can gather valuable data on how students are advancing in their learning.
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Taking advantage of the reports: While some users find the reports in Star Assessments tricky to master, they emphasize their value and usefulness with experience. These reports provide educators with detailed insights into students' strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
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Applicability for diverse student populations: Users find Star 360 to be a versatile tool suitable for students of all ages, grades, and abilities. They highlight its ability to provide real-time information based on national standards and district achievements, allowing educators to tailor instruction and support to individual student needs.
Overall, users highly recommend Renaissance Star Assessments as a practical and effective tool for educators to monitor student progress and help them achieve their highest potential.
Attribute Ratings
- 8.7Likelihood to Renew9 ratings
- 8.2Availability2 ratings
- 8.2Performance2 ratings
- 8.3Usability5 ratings
- 9Support Rating15 ratings
- 7.3Online Training1 rating
- 8.2Implementation Rating4 ratings
- 9.1Configurability2 ratings
- 8.2Product Scalability2 ratings
- 8.8Ease of integration3 ratings
- 8.2Vendor pre-sale2 ratings
- 8.2Vendor post-sale2 ratings
Reviews
(1-21 of 21)Renaissance Star Assessments Review
- Predicts grade equivalency.
- Offers guided skill practice.
- It would be great if Early Star had two separate tests for reading and math.
- I wish Star had its own built-in remedial program and placed students based on the skill deficiency.
STAR Assessments Are Super!
- Offers updated data.
- Offers reports that identify which standards students need practice in.
- Allows up to make student grouping decisions.
- The products are great but they are very expensive.
Your students can be stars with STAR Assessments!
- It shows the score immediately.
- Students can navigate the website easily.
- The teacher "side"/data is easy to navigate.
- 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.
Once you learn it use it !
- Placement
- Customized learning
- Parental engagement
- Learning curve in the beginning.
- Hard to reach assistance
Star Assessments Review
- Data
- Synchronization with Freckle
- Adaptive Tests
- More reports
- Control of adding students
- Cut scores in relation to state scores/levels
Reviewing of Renaissance Star Assessments
- Progress Monitoring
- Growth Proficiency Chart
- STAR Parent Report
- Making sure that teachers in the classroom have access to every tool available.
- Some of the options for reports are harder to access than others.
- I do miss the old format used up until 2 years ago-was easier to access.
- We have the flexibility to set our own benchmark windows. We set three as a district that are mandatory (BOY, MOY, and EOY). Then we add two more optional windows between the benchmarks for schools that need more data on specific students and/or grade levels. However, if needed, teachers can administer an assessment to students at any time of year to gather individual student data, even outside the windows.
- Renaissance is continually improving and adapting to the changing needs of schools. They have recently added Curriculum Based Measures for the elementary grades. These progress monitoring probes track students’ developmental growth with short one minute measures (i.e. letter sounds, oral reading, rapid automatic naming, numeral recognition, addition, subtraction, and multiplication). Item level scoring and reports provide teachers with specific skill insights to determine appropriate next steps.
- The easy to access and read reporting suite allows the district as well as schools and teachers to make informed decisions based on data. With the Star Screening Report, it’s easy to see which students are on track and which students may be at risk in reading, math, and early literacy. The Star State Performance Report is also another favorite because you can easily see which students are on track to meeting state proficiency requirements.
- In addition to the Star assessments, Renaissance has also created an extremely large library of resources that connect the assessment with instruction giving teachers immediate access to instructional resources aligned with their students’ data.
- We also utilize Renaissance’s Custom Data Integration services. It’s an automated process that populates student/staff/class data into Renaissance by syncing directly with our SIS. This means when a student moves in/out, it automatically syncs and no need to add/delete student accounts.
Star reading creates Star readers.
- Finds student reading level
- Provides ZPD
- Tracks student progress over time
- Uses close format mostly
- Does not listen to student reading for accuracy
- Track fluency
Renaissance 360 is 360 degrees of amazing
- Data management.
- Teacher incentives such as rewards.
- The tests are easy to monitor.
- More prizes.
- Fewer reports and more detailed response to the tests.
- More training on how to use all of the different reports.
Star Assessments: Our Key to Success
- Provides baseline data.
- Provides student achievement data allowing us to track student improvement.
- The reports are in-depth and well organized allowing teachers to focus on areas the class needs support with.
- No suggestions.
Renaissance review
- Grouping students.
- Clear reports.
- Easy use.
- Does not take up entire screen on Chromebooks.
- The testing well well- no suggestions.
STAR Assessments shine bright in the classroom.
- Assesses and assigns reading level, factoring in vocabulary, context clues, and reading strategy skills
- Pinpoints skills areas that are weak, and suggests focus for instruction
- Identifies skills that have been mastered, or most likely mastered
- Assigns ATOS independent book ZPD levels
- STAR test adapts to student performance to zero in on reading level
- Unified scale across assessment platforms (Early Literacy and Literacy)
- Some training required to get full benefit of program
- More information in a "parent format" would be nice
Renaissance Star 360...A Complete Program in One
- Renaissance Star 360 encompasses all the new Oklahoma Academic Standards which is helpful in documenting the requirements.
- Renaissance Star 360 allows for immediate data and feedback on where the teacher should start with intervention techniques and strategies.
- It illustrates a student's growth pattern for the teacher, administration, and parents. It takes away the guessing game of where a child is performing.
- It is a great tool for individualized instruction.
- There is a lot of data to filter through.
- The online reports could be combined.
- It is a great tool for individualized instruction. I would like to keep the AM tho.
- They assess without requiring excessive amounts of time, leaving more time for actual learning and instruction.
- There are a variety of reports available for different needs.
- Their norm data and percentile measures are statistically adjusted for weeks of instruction/ date the test is taken in relation to the norming study.
- The program is often slow and hangs up. It spins endlessly in a loop, frozen and requiring a refresh, when trying to create a pdf a great deal of the time.
- The reports can be made into a pdf, but unfortunately not an Excel/csv export--Unlike most other testing programs like NWEA/Map or iReady. The full data export that you can do is, big, slow to create, and missing information found in the reports--requiring me to make Excel programs to find and create/calculate the information (like summary data) already found in the Star reports but not exportable in csv form or to bring up in a report and manually enter the data (and the reports themselves do not lend to easily copy and pasting into excel directly from the screen, so no work around).
- You cannot easily create groups made up of students from various classes and teachers to share then share with other teachers. The system is more designed to create groups from within a single class. My district needs to make groups from across teachers, classes, etc., needs to have the groups available as source/student selections for all reports, and then needs to be able to easily be shared--even if the group is made up of students a teacher (or person the group is shared with) does not normally have in a class. The groups you can make are also not available to choose as source students for most reports. ALL reports need to be able to be comprised of students from a group, and not just from teachers and classes.
- When a student leaves the district, the RDI system not only removes the student from teachers/classes/groups, but deletes them and their records from the entire system. We often need to look back to check scores for State reporting or to forward to an old student's new district, and Renaissance/Star360 does not have anything available; the student and all their information is gone. I have to constantly take and save full csv exports, and when I need an old score, I have to try and search to find the right export, then search through the huge, messy export to find the required information. Once a student is removed, Renaissance/Star360 seriously needs to just remove them from classes, schools, groups, etc. but still have their information/previous testing results available to lookup
- If you need to find testing information quickly on a single student, you cannot just go to the student and see their score. You have to know the teacher, class, and grade they are in, then go to the teacher, then go to the class, before you can get to the student to get their information. As a school/District level person, I have the student's name and grade, but often have NO idea of exactly which teacher and class they are in. I then have to first waste my time looking the student up in my district's SIS (PowerSchool) to get all the needed information just to look them up. Seems like it would be an easy solution to keep all the same, but add an ability to get a basic report on a student by looking the student up directly under "Users" (a simple report like you get when you click on an individual student in the Record book). This is where you could tie in the ability to look up historical information on student who left the district during the school year and solve the previous problem/missing functionality as well!
Great Progress Monitoring Tool
- Breaks down assessment proficiency by skill.
- Tracks progress and helps students create new goals.
- Grade equivalency scores are not accurate, great for progress monitoring but not for actual ability level.
- No area to score writing - Would like to see it look more like state standardized tests.
Renaissance Star 360 is an excellent product.
- It's very convenient to use.
- It gives extremely reliable, clear data.
- It allows us to track progress easily and clearly at different levels within the organization.
- The home page can be confusing. The icons don't clearly indicate that they have multiple sub-menus.
- I would like to see more ability to compile data in graphical form. A picture is worth a thousand words.
- The help is not very good. It returns results that are only vaguely related to the query and returns too many results.
Reaching for the stars with Star 360
- The reports are easy to understand for both teachers and parents.
- The assessments provide more than just a score. The data can be broken down by standard to really target interventions.
- Star 360 is easy for students to use. The user platform is not complicated or distracting.
- It always seems that once I know where something (i.e. report) is located, that they move things around.
- It would be nice if teachers had more control over certain settings for their students, rather than an administrator who may not know a group of kids.
- It would be nice if there were features for students to adjust the content on their screens (color, size, etc.) like we have on state testing to make it more consistent.
Renaissance Star 360 show positive growth and results!
- Engages students.
- Creates motivation for learning.
- Provides data to help students with their weaknesses.
- Math Facts in a Flash could have better graphics and be more engaging to young students.
- On the flower page when students finish a quiz, the page could tell students how many more tests they need to make their goal.
Go for the A.R.
- The program places students where they need to be as far as reading level
- Keeps up with reading progress
- Helps teachers to know what educational needs of the child needs to be addressed
- Praises students who have gone above and beyond
- Easy to administer, take and obtain results
- Easier manipulation of the web site for adults
- Could you create a cheat sheet to help us get to the areas which are in high demand?
- I love the chat help! But lately during the beginning of the year, I had to wait my turn. Hire more people during this peak time!
- Need to address excessive cost!
- Has crashed once for us and we lost the whole class's results.
Renaissance Star 360 is well suited in the lower grades. The students enjoy reading, earning points and showing progress.
My concern is in the upper grades. we need to find something to help motivate the students who does not want to read or who feels it is not cool to be a reader! Time and time again our students are turned onto reading, the Star reinforces the students reading improvement!
Reading With Renaissance
- Wide variety of book titles
- Many graphs for teachers to choose how to view data
- User-friendly for both students and staff
- Mid-year changes are difficult to keep up with, especially when the changes were made in May when many schools were trying to receive data graphs that were no longer there
- Be more competitively priced - they are more expensive than other reading comprehension on-line programs
STAR 360 for Secondary Use
- The Star assessment is not time consuming to administer. It is appropriate for a base-line measure of secondary students.
- The assessment is on the computer. Secondary students answer 34 multiple choice questions. It is a 'smart' assessment that adjusts what questions will be asked based on whether or not the previous question was answered correctly. Students rarely see questions repeated.
- The data produced by STAR is presented in an easy-to-understand format that is clear when presented to parents and students.
- The Star assessment focuses on two main reading skills: vocabulary and comprehension; however, all of the questions are done through multiple choice. While unlikely, students can 'guess' the correct answers, and this does impact the data.
- Some students will deliberately throw the test because it is used to develop goals within the Accelerated Reader program; while the students' choices aren't indicative of a flaw in the program, it is a detracting factor when the test is administered 3+times each year and connected to the reading practice portion of the program.
- Each question in the program is individually timed. This function does allow for a basic measure of fluency, however it can be tricky for students to maintain focus throughout the entire assessment, especially when answering questions about longer passages.