Over the past several months, we’ve been highlighting the value of Focus Skills. Although Focus Skills have been part of Star Assessments for several years, they’ve recently taken center stage, due to disruptions of classroom instruction and the urgency to providing educators the tools to target instruction.
For those not familiar with Focus Skills, Renaissance identifies these skills within the learning progression as the building blocks of learning in reading and math. Obviously, all K–12 reading and math skills are important, and students benefit from learning any new skill, but Focus Skills are more critical than others because they are the prerequisites for future learning and essential to students’ progression.
So, what’s new? Renaissance is proud to announce that Focus Skills are now available in the Star Spanish learning progression within the Star software. They are also freely available on our website.
We know that teachers are often tasked with covering more skills than realistically possible, and essential skills are often co-mingled with non-essential skills. Identifying Focus Skills is really a way to help educators prioritize which skills they should focus on teaching.
Just like our English learning progressions, Star Spanish learning progressions* are empirically validated, aligned to state standards, pinpoint the skills students are ready to work on next, and now identify Focus Skills. For K–12 students taking Star Spanish assessments, educators will not only see the skills students are ready to work on based on their Star scaled score, but they will also be able to quickly identify Focus Skills—the skills that are critical to providing the greatest return in terms of student growth.
*For all Star users, except for those in Texas and California, the Star Spanish learning progression is standards–agnostic. (Texas: The Spanish learning progression is aligned to the Texas TEKS Spanish. California: The Spanish learning progression is aligned to the California Common Core en Español.)