Start the school year with greater clarity, stronger confidence, and more time to focus on what matters most: your students. This year’s updates to Star Assessments are designed to make growth data more meaningful, streamline time-intensive workflows, and expand support for every learner.
Supporting early learners from the start
As districts and early childhood programs prepare for a new school year, educators are focused on one critical goal: making sure every preschool learner starts strong and stays on track for kindergarten success.
Discover new, more efficient ways to understand and support your youngest learners with Star Preschool Numeracy and Star Preschool Whole Child. Building on Star Preschool Literacy (introduced in 2023), these new assessments provide a more comprehensive picture of school readiness, helping educators screen students and monitor progress in early math and critical whole child skills, including social-emotional competencies and approaches to learning.
Learn more about Star Preschool
More meaningful measures of student growth
Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) go beyond achievement to show how much progress a student is making over time. By comparing growth against academic peers nationwide, SGPs help educators understand whether students are growing as expected, providing essential context for interpreting score changes, making informed instructional decisions, and evaluating interventions and resource allocation.
For the 2026–27 school year, updated SGPs in Star Assessments will be available beginning August 1, 2026, delivering even more accurate and relevant insights into student progress.
These enhancements improve how student growth is measured, ensuring results reflect current peer performance and provide a more precise view of progress over time. You’ll get:
- A clearer picture of student growth today
- Stronger insights for all students, especially transitional readers in early literacy and bilingual learners
You can continue using SGPs with confidence, now with even greater precision to inform your instructional decisions.
Download the SGP back-to-school update FAQ and watch this brief video to learn more about this enhancement.
Spend less time scoring and more time teaching with AI-powered assistance
Oral reading assessments provide critical insight into student progress—but scoring them can be time-intensive and difficult to scale.
We’re excited to introduce Star CBM Reading Passage Oral Reading with an AI-powered Scoring Assist option, designed to reduce one of the most time-consuming educator tasks without removing teachers from the process.
This enhancement helps you translate oral reading accuracy and fluency data into timely, targeted support for students. By combining student recordings with AI-supported scoring, Passage Oral Reading with Scoring Assist streamlines scoring while maintaining educator oversight, so you can spend less time evaluating and more time supporting student growth with confidence.
Click here to learn more.
Expanded Star CBM Math and Star CBM Lectura field test measures
To provide educators with additional insight into foundational literacy and numeracy skills, Star CBM continues to expand its assessment offerings. For the 2026–2027 school year, Star CBM Lectura now includes the field test measure Segmentación de sílabas (Syllabification), helping educators assess an additional foundational Spanish literacy skill while supporting the collection of field test data for the 2026-2027 school year.
Additional measures undergoing field testing include Identificación de letras (Letter Identification) for Star CBM Lectura and Mixed Multiplication and Division and Division to 100 for Star CBM Math.
As new field test measures are introduced, Star CBM has been updated to make assessments easier to locate within the Record Book. Assessment categories, including Foundations of Literacy and Foundations of Math, remain the same, while a new More Measures option helps organize available measures and support future assessment expansion.
Star CBM Math Record Book
These enhancements further support bilingual, dual language, and early numeracy programs by providing additional insight into students’ foundational skills and development.
Updated learning progressions available for the 2026–2027 school year
Learning progressions provide a research-based pathway of skills aligned to local standards, helping educators better understand student readiness and support instructional planning.
To help educators align assessment insights with the latest academic standards, Renaissance has updated learning progressions in Star Assessments for several states and provinces:
- Maryland (Reading, Math)
- Mississippi (Reading, Math)
- Montana (Math)
- South Dakota (Reading)
- Texas (PreK: Reading, Math, Lectura)
- Alberta (Reading, Math)
By connecting assessment results to a progression of learning, Star helps educators focus on the skills students are ready to learn next, enabling more targeted instruction and supporting continued growth throughout the school year.
Explore instructional resources aligned with your state standards and tailored to your students’ learning needs.
A stronger start for every student
Together, these updates are designed to help you start the year with:
• More meaningful growth insights
• Less time spent on 1:1 assessment tasks
• Expanded support and insights, especially for early learners
Our goal is to give you clarity, time, and flexibility to respond to student needs with confidence, so you can focus on what matters most: helping every learner grow.
Looking ahead: Updated state linking studies
State linking studies help educators understand how Star assessment results align to state assessment performance expectations, providing valuable context for goal setting, progress monitoring, and instructional planning during the school year.
As part of Renaissance’s ongoing commitment to keeping state assessment predictions current and accurate, updated linking studies for select states will be released early in the 2026–2027 school year.