Technical Manual - Renaissance Learning

ValidityRelationship of STAR Early Literacy Enterprise Scores to Common Core State Standards Skills RatingsFigure 13: Relationship of the Endorsement Rates on the Ten CCSS Skill Rating Itemsto STAR Early Literacy Enterprise Scaled ScoresAs 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 Common Core StateStandards (CCSS) developed by the National Governors Association and theCouncil of Chief State School Officers. As before, the intent of this checklist was toprovide teachers with a single, brief instrument they could use to rate any studentfrom pre-kindergarten through third grade. In this section, we present data on therelationship between student’s skills ratings on the instrument and their scores onSTAR Early Literacy Enterprise.To gather the ratings of literacy skills from teachers, a short list of dichotomousitems that 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 thepreceding ones correctly as well. Such a list, even though quite short, wouldenable us reliably to sort students from pre-kindergarten through third grade intoan ordered set of skill categories.A list of ten skill-related items was assembled. Each participating teacher wasasked to rate his or her STAR Early Literacy Equivalence Study students as toSTAR Early LiteracyTechnical Manual98