Company shares vision for creating a unified learning ecosystem designed to reduce teacher prep time and boost student performance

WISCONSIN RAPIDS, Wis. (June 27, 2016) – In this era of assessment and accountability, teachers and administrators are exploring every opportunity to support student achievement. Yet, educators too often fall victim to “time drain” and low-value tasks that rob time and energy from purposeful instruction. Renaissance, the leader in K-12 cloud-based assessment and learning analytics, announces its plan to bridge assessment to lesson planning and instruction in a way that liberates teachers from tedious prep work and enables them to focus on student growth.

“The most common refrain we hear from teachers is that they wish they had more time to spend on things that truly make a difference for students,” said Jack Lynch, CEO of Renaissance Learning. “So we’re creating a connected learning ecosystem that helps teachers realize that aspiration and gives them back precious time that they can spend helping students do their best work.”

According to research conducted by Simon-Kutcher & Partners, teachers spend eight hours a week, on average, in lesson planning to target instruction for students grouped together by proficiency level. This considerable amount of time is used to take data out of assessment systems and import it into instructional systems, group students by scale score, and search on the internet to locate resources they can use to differentiate instruction by group.

“It’s unfair to ask educators to be data engineers and IT experts in addition to being teachers,” Lynch said. “By unifying the education workflow elements, we can remove that burden and let educators do what they do best: teach.”

Over the past five years, Renaissance Learning has adopted a customer-centric product focus and increased investment in product development by 70 percent. This has resulted in new products, such as research-backed learning science engine Learnalytics™, personalized reading comprehension program Accelerated Reader 360™, and a comprehensive reading and math assessment program STAR 360™.

During the 2016-2017 school year, Renaissance Learning plans to execute its vision of building a unified learning ecosystem laser-focused on student growth.

About Renaissance

Renaissance, the leader of K-12 cloud-based assessment and learning analytics, has a presence in more than one-third of U.S. schools and 60 countries around the world. By delivering deep insight into what students know, what they like and how they learn, Renaissance enables educators to deliver highly personalized and timely instruction while driving student growth in reading, writing and math. To learn more, visit: www.renaissance.com.