November 10, 2014

The second and most significant round of enhancements to STAR Assessments will be rolled this week. The Reading and Maths Dashboards will appear on Renaissance Place sites overnight from Wednesday 12th November. These Dashboards are interactive screens that help teachers to visualise and respond to assessment data much more intuitively than before. Data for the Dashboards updates automatically overnight. Please note: all of the existing reports for AR, AM and STAR will remain available for now. These are additional features, not replacements for anything.

The exact date for the release will be announced here as soon as it has been confirmed.

Screenshots of the Reading and Maths Dashboards
The Reading and Maths Dashboards provide longitudinal reporting for students, classes and year groups.

Assessments to inform planning and teaching

The guiding principle behind the updates to STAR is to bridge the gap between assessment and instruction. The Dashboard has been designed explicitly for teachers to save them time in analysing student data and to provide them with the necessary data in order to plan and teach effectively. The Dashboard answers these questions:

  • How are my students performing?
  • Who needs immediate attention?
  • How can I point every student towards progress?

The printable instructional planning reports include skill-based feedback from the Core Progress learning progressions. The learning progressions are descriptions of the skills students need to know in the order in which they are typically learned. They have been built for the new national curriculum in collaboration with NFER and are empirically validated against assessment data. For more information about learning progressions, please download our PDF report Learning Progressions in the New National Curriculum.

Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs)

The Dashboard makes available for the first time a new measure of growth: the Student Growth Percentile. The SGP is a measure of how good a student’s growth is compared to his or her peers in the same year group with a similar scaled score.

Important scores on the Dashboard

Scaled score Tells you a student’s level of attainment on a vertical scale from 0 to 1400.
Percentile Rank Tells you how a student’s level of attainment compared to his or her peers of a similar age.
Student Growth Percentile Tells you how good a student’s rate of growth is compared to his or her peers in the same year group with a similar scaled score. A student making high levels growth will be between the 66th and 99th percentiles; a student making typical growth will be between the 35th and 65th percentiles; a student making low growth will be between the 1st and 34th percentiles.

For more information about SGPs, see the FAQ document What is a Student Growth Percentile?

Resources

We recently hosted an online webinar training session entitled, “Exploring the new Dashboard.” You can watch a recording of this event online.

In addition, we have published a print-friendly PDF document with annotated examples from the Dashboard, which outlines the information available through the Dashboard and how it will inform planning and teaching.

For a one-stop-shop of resources for STAR Assessments, visit our STAR Resources page.

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