Throughout the school year students in Kindergarten through Grade 2 take several assessments to gauge their progress in Reading and Mathematical skills. STAR Early Literacy Tests are administered three times each year (often more!) as an iPad-based diagnostic assessment for determining early literacy and numeracy progress for emerging readers at Trinity. Teachers and parents receive valid, reliable, actionable reports concerning Reading Foundational Skills, Language, and Numbers & Operations.
In particular, STAR gauges growth over a year of classroom instruction covering three domains of the following eight fundamental literacy skills:
Reading Foundation Skills
Print Concepts
• Directionality
• Letters and words
• Word length
• Word borders
• Visual discrimination/alphabetic principles
• Alphabetic sequence
• Print features
Phonological Awareness
• Rhyming and word families
• Blending, counting and segmenting syllables
• Blending and segmenting words
• Isolating initial, final, and medial phonemes
• Adding and substituting phonemes
Phonics and Word Recognition
Spelling-sound correspondences: consonants
• Spelling-sound correspondences: vowels
• Regular and irregular spellings
• High-frequency words
• Inflectional endings and affixes
• Syllables
Fluency
• Reading for purpose
• Reading with comprehension
• Reading repair and self-correction
• Reading pace (word count per minute)
• Prosody (rhythm and intonation)
Language
Vocabulary Acquisition and Use
• Word relationships
• Structural analysis
• Antonyms
• Multiple-meaning words
• Synonyms
Numbers and Operations
Counting and Cardinality
• Number naming
• Number identification
• Number-object correspondence
• Sequence completion
Operations and Algebraic Thinking
• Composing
• Decomposing
• Calculating
Measurement and Data
• Length and mass
• Understanding data
Reports about student growth across these skill sets are shared in Parent Conferences, Curriculum Night Presentations, and with Report Cards. Students proficient in these skills are ready for Grade 3, and in Grade 3 students then take Measures of Academic Progress tests (MAP®) three times a year to gauge growth through Grade 8.