Renaissance® Blog
Shareable tips and insightful thoughts on K–12 education. Subscribe to the Renaissance Newsletter and get the latest posts delivered straight to your inbox.
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January 15, 2021
COVID-19 has impacted every aspect of K–12 education, from familiar classroom routines to when and how we assess our students. With thousands of buildings closed and millions of students learning remotely, educational data is playing a more important role than […]
January 8, 2021
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer Like nearly all children in the 1970s and 80s, I fully embraced the early video games of that era. For many, the only access to these was at video arcades. […]
December 11, 2020
With learning models shifting—in some cases, multiple times—this school year, educators have shown us just how resilient (in fact, superheroic) they really are. But these shifts haven’t been without challenges, especially when it comes to gathering student data to inform […]
December 4, 2020
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer Last spring, the word that kept coming to mind amid the COVID-19 disruptions was surreal. Things seemed so unbelievable that one had to ask, Is this real? Is this actually […]
November 20, 2020
By Dr. Jan K. Bryan, Vice President and National Education Officer Note: This is the second in a series of blogs about the new book Literacy Reframed. You can read the first blog in the series by clicking here. Several […]
November 13, 2020
By Dr. Scott McConnell, Director of Assessment Innovation As educators, we were thrown a curve ball last spring, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread school closures and a quick pivot to remote education. Back then, many of us hoped […]
November 6, 2020
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer Emerson wrote that “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” For me, this is the case when I read particularly insightful books. The […]
October 22, 2020
Back-to-School looked a lot different this year, with many schools and districts providing instruction remotely either full or part time. While it’s certainly possible for students to thrive in remote- and hybrid-learning environments, educators also face new challenges. Do all […]
October 14, 2020
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer Last spring, school buildings had barely gone dark before questions about potential learning loss began to appear. The title of an Education Week article from early April read, “How Schools […]
October 2, 2020
Accelerated Reader includes more than 210,000 quizzes on a wide range of fiction and nonfiction books. The majority of these are Reading Practice Quizzes, which assess students’ literal comprehension of the books they’ve read. In an earlier blog, we provided […]
September 25, 2020
Note: This is the second blog in a two-part series about bilingualism and biliteracy. To read the first blog in the series, click here. Schools across the US are using Star Assessments in Spanish and English to assess their emergent […]
September 22, 2020
By Dr. Gene Kerns, Vice President and Chief Academic Officer For many of us, fall screening may look a bit different this year, especially if we’re assessing students remotely. Nonetheless, we’ll soon have—or may already have—our fall screening results. Based […]