Technical Manual - Renaissance Learning

Content and Item DevelopmentItem Development: STAR Early Literacy EnterpriseTextContent for STAR Early Literacy Enterprise approximately covers a range of itemsbroad enough to test students from pre-kindergarten through grade 3 as well asremedial students in grade 4. The final collection of test items is large enough sothat students can be assessed ten times a year or more without being given theitems twice within any 30-day period. There are also enough test items forassessing skills in ten sub-domains. The following sub-domains are consideredessential in reading development:1. Alphabetic Principle (AP)—Knowledge of letter names, alphabetic lettersequence, and the sounds associated with letters.2. Concept of Word (CW)—Understanding of print concepts regarding writtenword length and word borders and the difference between words and letters.3. Visual Discrimination (VS)—Differentiating both upper- and lowercaseletters, identifying words that are different and matching words that are thesame.4. Phonemic Awareness (PA)—Understanding of rhyming words, ability toblend and segment word parts and phonemes, isolating and manipulatinginitial, final, and medial phonemes, and identifying the sounds in consonantblend.5. Phonics (PH)—Understanding of short, long, variant vowels, and other vowelsounds, initial and final consonants, consonant blends and digraphs,consonant and vowel substitution, and identification of rhyming words andsounds in word families.6. Structural Analysis (SA)—Understanding affixes and syllable patterns indecoding, and identification of compound words.7. Vocabulary (VO)—Knowledge of high-frequency words, regular and irregularsight words, multi-meaning words, and words used to describe categoricalrelationships, position words, synonyms, and antonyms.8. Sentence-Level Comprehension (SC)—Identification of words in context.9. Paragraph-Level Comprehension (PC)—Identification of the main topic oftext and ability to answer literal and inferential questions after listening to orreading text.Each of the items was developed according to the following specifications:STAR Early Literacy Enterprise items are designed to efficiently assesstargeted skills. Items should not take overly long for a student when taking atest. The items should be engaging so that students will enjoy reading them.STAR Early LiteracyTechnical Manual31