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Universal Screener

Overview

The universal screener is the assessment districts are mandated to give three times a year, to find the children who need help before the state assessment says so. It reaches TKG Analytics as the three Renaissance STAR screeners:

  • STAR Early Literacy, mostly in Pre-K and Kindergarten
  • STAR Math
  • STAR Reading

Which grades sit which screener is your district's decision, and TKG Analytics keeps whatever your export carries.

A screener is not accountability data. It never touches your scores, your Impacts or your accountability projections, and it never changes a published number. It is kept apart from them, so you can act on it without it acting on your results.

When It Is Given

Three windows a year:

Window When
Beginning of Year (BOY) August
Middle of Year (MOY) December
End of Year (EOY) April

TKG Analytics keeps one result per student, per screener, per window. A child who sat the same screener twice inside a window has one stored result.

Each result keeps the school, teacher and grade it was imported with. TKG Analytics never reads them back from the child's current record, so a child who moves schools after a window keeps that window's result where it was stored, and a school's counts do not change when its children move.

The Five Levels

Every result falls in one of five levels, decided from the child's national percentile rank on that screener:

Level Label Percentile rank What it means
1 Urgent Intervention 1 to 18 Far below the expected level; the child needs intensive intervention now.
2 Intervention 19 to 32 Well below the expected level; the child needs targeted intervention beyond the classroom.
3 On Watch 33 to 45 Below the expected level and at risk of falling further behind; the first level to plan support for.
4 Approaching Proficiency 46 to 55 Slightly below the expected level, and likely to reach it with classroom support.
5 At Proficiency 56 to 99 Performing at or above the level expected for the grade.

Level 5 is the best and level 1 the worst, the same way round as a MAAP performance level, where 5 is Advanced. A screener level is still not a MAAP level: a screener level 4 says where a child sits among children nationally, not whether they are MAAP Proficient, so never read one as the other. TKG Analytics never puts the two numbers side by side without saying which is which.

The levels are norm-referenced

A level comes from the child's national percentile rank: how they did compared with children in the same grade across the country, not against a fixed cut on the scale. So every child in a school can raise their scale score and the share At Proficiency can stay flat, because the comparison moved too. A screener proficiency figure is not an accountability figure, and TKG Analytics never shows the two together without saying which is which.

Why Your Renaissance Dashboard May Disagree

The five levels above are TKG Analytics's own, and they are the same for every district and every screener. Renaissance lets each district configure its own benchmark band for each screener, with its own labels and its own cuts, and TKG Analytics does not read that band. So your Renaissance dashboard and TKG Analytics may disagree about which children are At Proficiency. When they do, the difference is the band, not the scores.

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