Product Highlights: Shared insights for educators, students, and families

The last two years have brought many changes to K–12 education, especially around how educators interact and communicate with students and their families. You’ll find a number of new features in your Renaissance products to support greater student and family engagement—along with new reports to provide greater insight into students’ progress and instructional needs.

A summary of these recent enhancements appears below. To read the full details, visit our Product Updates Blog. We also invite you to bookmark the Product Updates Blog and visit throughout the year for the latest information and resources.

Enhanced Family Report in Star Assessments

A strong home-school connection plays an important role in students’ success. The enhanced Star Family Report helps you to strengthen this connection by easily sharing students’ Star Reading and Star Math scores with families. As shown below, the report shows students’ overall performance in relation to school, district, or state benchmarks, as well as performance by domain:

Families can scan the report’s QR code to access additional information about Star scores, along with guidance for interpreting the student’s results. For Star Reading, the report also identifies the student’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which is the “just-right” range for daily reading practice.

Learn more: Read the post on the Product Updates Blog. See the guidance that’s provided to families when they scan the report’s QR code. Learn more about ZPD in Star Assessments and Accelerated Reader.

Helpful new features in the Star Record Book

Star’s Record Book enables you to review students’ performance on both the computer-adaptive assessments and curriculum-based measures. You’ll find several new features in the Record Book to help you act on your students’ Star data.

For example, alerts now appear for extremely short testing times, indicating that students may have rushed through the assessment. You can also create dynamic instructional groups of students who are ready to work on the same skills. And you now have greater control over how skills are displayed. For example, you can choose to view all skills or only Focus Skills. If you’re using Star Assessments in Spanish, you can also easily toggle between skills in Spanish and English, and you can choose to flag English/Spanish transferable skills as well.

Learn more: Read the post on the Product Updates Blog. Discover transferable skills in Star. Explore Focus Skills in English and in Spanish.

Expanded Spanish support in Freckle

Freckle for math provides students with engaging, differentiated practice from kindergarten through Algebra 2. To better support students whose dominant language is Spanish, Freckle now integrates with Star Math in Spanish. This means students’ Star scores are used to place them at the appropriate level in Freckle, without the need for an additional assessment.

Also, students whose language is set to Spanish in Freckle can now toggle between Spanish and English while practicing math. Teachers can also preview Freckle math practice in Spanish (as shown below), and Freckle reports now reflect the student’s language setting as well. If a student completes a math activity in Spanish, the Spanish version of the activity is accessible from the report.

Learn more: Read the post on the Product Updates Blog. Explore the integration between Freckle and Star Assessments. See how Freckle helps you to monitor students’ progress toward important math milestones.

New features and titles in myON

Over the past two years, the number of students and families reading digital books on myON has grown significantly. Educators who are using myON for the first time have a new onboarding experience to introduce them to the program. Plus, all educators can now easily “demo” the student experience in myON, so they can quickly show students and families how to browse and search for digital books, how to review reading recommendations, and much more.

Students and families will also find more than 100 new titles in the myON Core Collection, along with 65 titles that are also now available in Spanish. These additions include both fiction and nonfiction books at a range of reading levels and interest levels—to provide students with even greater choice for daily reading practice.

Learn more: Read the post about the new myON demo experience. Explore the new titles in the myON Core Collection. Get tips for implementing myON across your curriculum.

New insights on foundational literacy development in Lalilo

Lalilo is an innovative program that helps K–2 students master foundational skills in phonics, word recognition, comprehension, and more. Districts using the premium version of Lalilo now have access to administrator reports and dashboards that show student engagement and usage by classroom, by school, and across the district.

With this data, administrators can more easily understand students’ foundational literacy practice and identify schools and classrooms that may be underutilizing the program. They can also better implement a blended approach that includes both face-to-face instruction and independent practice on important early literacy skills.

Learn more: Read the post on the Product Updates blog. Explore key Lalilo features in our new Literacy Minutes videos. See the 5 ways the Science of Reading should guide early literacy instruction in every district.

New skill set reporting in Star Early Literacy in Spanish

Star Early Literacy assesses the developing literacy skills of K–3 students. The Spanish version of Star Early Literacy now provides subdomain and skill set scores, so you can easily identify areas to focus on as you guide students toward reading proficiently in Spanish. This data is also useful in states where educators are required to screen all students for early indicators of dyslexia.

Learn more: Read the post on the Product Updates Blog. Explore Star Assessments in Spanish. Discover a new instructional resource in Star for English and Spanish literacy development.

Connecting assessment to instruction in Star CBM

Star’s curriculum-based measures are available for reading (K–6) and math (K–3). In the Star Record Book, you can now quickly see skills students are ready to learn, based on their performance on a Star CBM measure. You can view all skills or only critical Focus Skills. You can also easily create instructional groups for students with similar needs, as shown below.

In addition, Star CBM’s Data Insights Dashboard has new filtering options, to give you a more granular view of student proficiency and growth. You can choose to view data from grade-level screening measures, all measures given, all normed measures, or any individual measure to get the just-right data picture to meet your needs.

Learn more: Read the post on the Product Updates Blog. Explore the Star CBM Data Insights Dashboard. See which measures are available for reading and for math in Star CBM.

A strong start to the new year

You’ll see additional product enhancements in the weeks and months ahead. You’ll also continue to find new content in your Renaissance programs—including new Accelerated Reader book quizzes that reflect our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. If you’re using our Nearpod platform, you’ll also soon have access to activities from Freckle, myON, and Lalilo in the Nearpod library, offering further opportunities to engage students in just-right practice both in and out of the classroom.