Renaissance Unified Scale

Aug 10, 2021 | Databits

Starting with the 2022-23 school year Renaissance will only reference the Unified Scale score for SEL, SR and SM Assessments (English and Spanish). Imagine School will transition to the use of the Unified Scale Score as the default scale score for all reports for the 2021-2022 school year.

What does that mean to me?

First:

What will NOT change on a particular student’s reports?

All other scores derived from the results of a student assessment including:

  • Student Growth Percentile (SGP)
  • Normal Curve Equicalent (NCE)
  • Percentile Rank (PR)
  • Screening Category
  • Instructional Reading Level (IRL)
  • Estimated Oral Reading Fluency (ORF)
  • Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) ranges
  • Lexile
  • Predicted Performance

What WILL change?

Scale Score

The change in scale for these assessments is exactly like a change in the distance scale from miles to kilometers. It is 1,053 miles or 1,695 KM from my home to the national office This will take the same amount of time and gasoline regardless of whether the odometer in my car is programmed to display miles or kilometers.

The Unified Scale was developed by Renaissance to establish one consistent scale across all computer adaptive tests:   SEL, SR, and SM (both English and Spanish Versions)

This graphic should help you to visualize the relationship between the previously separate Enterprise scales for SEL and SR and the Unified Scale.

A note of caution is necessary here to discourage over-interpretation of this unified score scale: Although Star Early Literacy Enterprise and Star Reading Enterprise are fairly highly correlated, they measure different aspects of the progression from pre-literacy to fully-developed reading proficiency. Consequently, the highest claim that can be made about the Star Early Reading scale scores is that they identify new Star Early Literacy scores that are approximately equivalent to Star Reading scores.

A few takeaways:

The recommended transition point from SEL to SR was an Enterprise SEL score of 775 and from SR to SEL an Enterprise SR score of 151. Now it is much simpler. A student scoring a Unified Scale score greater than 852 should be considered for SR on the next assessment and a student scoring a Unified Scale score less than 852 should be considered for SEL on the next assessment.

The SGP score of a student taking SEL at the beginning of the year and transitioning to SR during the year will be available.

The cut-scores you see when viewing the State Benchmarks will reflect the Unified Scale.

Caveat:

A scale score (on any scale) is linear but expected growth is not linear. This is the same concept as a height chart for a child’s expected growth. Therefore, a growth of 200 scale score points means a different thing for a 2nd grade student and a 6th grade student. This is the purpose of standardized scores. A PR of 50 and an SGP of 50 means that a student is performing and growing at the midpoint of his/her peers. This interpretation holds true across the grade levels.

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