Students entering Evanston Township High School scored higher this fall on the STAR test for reading than the last few years, with 63% of students starting the year with a score of 8.0 or higher on the test. School officials presented this data in a larger literacy report at the District 202 Board of Education meeting on Feb. 10 held at the high school.
“The one thing we noted for this year with our incoming freshmen group was that they overall were performing higher than they had in the last three years,” said Kiwana Brown, the school’s associate principal of instruction and literacy.
The last time more than 60% of ETHS freshmen scored above 8.0 on this test was in 2021, with the following years seeing score drops as the effects of pandemic education began to show.
Disparities between demographic groups also decreased on the test this fall, although the gaps between groups remain dramatic.
“In particular, our brown students had increased by about 10% in coming in and our black students about 5%,” Brown said. “It was great to see that increase in their instructional reading level.”
The RoundTable took a dive into the STAR test to contextualize these scores and what they mean for students.
How STAR evaluates students
The STAR literacy test uses a roughly 15-minute computer adaptive assessment (the computer aligns question difficulty to how a student answered the previous question) to quickly get a sense for a student’s reading abilities.
“ETHS administers the STAR Reading Assessment to 9th graders in the fall of each year,” ETHS’s report reads. “This data is used to inform instruction and to monitor progress. This chart reflects STAR’s Instructional Reading Level (IRL); the IRL is the level at which a student’s class materials would be best prepared.”
The score that ETHS refers to in this literacy report chart, the IRL score, refers to “the highest reading level at which a student is 80% proficient (or higher) at comprehending material with assistance,” according to the test’s website.
“A sixth-grade student with an IRL of 4.0, for example, would be best served by instructional materials prepared at the fourth-grade level,” the test’s manual reads.
This means that students scoring an 8.0, the bar referred to in the ETHS literacy report for ninth graders, would best be taught with some assistance using class materials prepared for the level of a student entering eighth grade.
STAR test creator Renaissance also announced that this year they updated their scoring norms based on data from the 2022-2023 school year. Previously, they used data from 2018-2019 to create these norms.
“Assessment providers are working to update their norms so that today post-pandemic students are being compared to post-pandemic norms, rather than historical, pre-pandemic ones,” Renaissance writes.
This means that in comparison to existing school or district benchmarks, “in general, fewer students will be classified as needing intervention and more students as at/above benchmark.”
Hopeful jumps in demographic disparities
The fall’s scores do provide a small piece of promising, data-driven evidence of diminishing achievement gaps between demographic groups, although they might be slightly influenced by the changes to STAR tests explained above.
Hispanic/Latino students saw the highest jump of any demographic group, with the amount of students reaching proficiency jumping ten percentage points, from 34% to 44%.
Black/African American students saw a smaller jump of five percentage points, from 33% to 38%.
White students saw the smallest increase in percentage of students reaching proficiency, increasing by three percentage points from 79% to 80%.
While the disparities between these groups is still dramatic, students of color seeing the highest increases in proficiency is promising.
For those who do not meet proficiency on the STAR test, though, no demographic data was given for the tiers of interventions required. ETHS offers multiple intervention tiers to meet student needs, increasing in assistance depending on how behind a student enters ETHS.
The RoundTable reached out to the school for more information on the STAR test and tiers of intervention, but did not receive a response before publication.
ETHS freshmen reading scores rebound from pandemic impact is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.