Technical Manual - Renaissance Learning

ValidityRelationship of STAR Early Literacy Enterprise Scores to Common Core State Standards Skills RatingsFigure 12: Scree Plot of the Extracted FactorsRelationship of STAR Early Literacy Enterprise Scores to CommonCore State Standards Skills RatingsThe Rating InstrumentAs was done in the original STAR Early Literacy Validation Study, in order to havean independent common measure of literacy skills, Renaissance Learningconstructed a ten item checklist for teachers to use during the Equivalence Studyto rate their students on a wide range of competencies related to developingliteracy skills. In keeping with current developments in assessment in the U.S., thecompetencies to be rated represented key skills in the CCSS developed by theNational Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Asbefore, the intent of this checklist was to provide teachers with a single, briefinstrument they could use to rate any student from pre-kindergarten through thirdgrade. In this section, we present the new skills rating instrument itself, itspsychometric properties as observed in the Equivalence Study, and therelationship between student skills ratings on the instrument and their scores onSTAR Early Literacy Enterprise.To gather ratings of literacy skills from teachers, a short list of dichotomous itemsthat represent a hierarchy of skills aligned to the CCSS was constructed. Thisrating instrument was intended to specify a sequence of skills that the teachercould quickly assess for each student, chosen such that a student who cancorrectly perform the nth skill in the list can almost certainly perform all of theSTAR Early LiteracyTechnical Manual95