Star CBM Screening Windows and Benchmarks

In Star CBM, benchmarks show whether students are performing as expected on the measure for the grade level and season. Seasons include Fall, Winter, and Spring:

Benchmarks are available for the measures recommended for each grade and season; see the table below. Note: Star CBM benchmarks cannot be changed.

A student's screening assessment is the first assessment taken in the season for the recommended screening measure.

* Recommended screening measure for the grade and subject. For Passage Oral Reading, only passages at the student's grade have benchmarks.

** For kindergarten, Sight and High-Frequency Words benchmarks are only available for spring. For
grade 1, Sight and High-Frequency Words benchmarks are available for winter and spring.

On the CBM English Assessments tab in the Star Record Book, when benchmarks are available for a student's score, the background color shows which benchmark category the score falls into.

For most assessments with benchmarks, there are three benchmark categories:

Sometimes, there are only two benchmark categories:

• For Sight and High-Frequency Words grade K spring and grade 1 winter benchmarks, those categories are At/Above Benchmark (green) and Intervention (red).
• For Rapid Automatic Naming measures, those categories are At/Above Benchmark (green) and At Risk (red).

For measures that don't have norms and benchmarks for the student's grade and season, scores are shown on a gray background. (This includes scores for measures that are being field tested, which don't have benchmarks available.) If you see a green check mark next to the score, that score would fall within the At/Above Benchmark category in the nearest grade and season where benchmarks exist for the measure. (For Sight and High-Frequency Words, Passage Oral Reading, and Encoding, when the student is assessed at another grade level, the benchmarks for the assessment's grade level and the nearest season to the student's grade are used for the check mark.)

See Star CBM Score and Benchmark Tables to get detailed information about:

• which Correct Per Minute (CPM) scores and Percentile Rank (PR) scores are in each benchmark category for each grade and season with benchmarks (Encoding uses percent correct scores instead of CPM)
• how Percentile Rank (PR) scores relate to CPM or percent correct scores for each grade and season with benchmarks

Once the first assessment has been scored, at the top of the CBM English Assessments tab on the Star Record Book page, you will also see the Star CBM Reading or Star CBM Math status bar. This bar shows you the latest assessment results for the selected subject based on each student's last assessment (even if the students weren't assessed on the same measure). The bars indicate how many students tested in the Intervention, On Watch, or At Above Benchmark categories in their last assessment. The gray portion of the bar shows you how many students took assessments that don't have a benchmark for their grade level. The white portion with the dashed line shows how many students haven't taken any assessments. If you move the cursor over the bar, you will see how many students are in each category.

Rapid Automatic Naming assessments are not included in the status bar.

How Were the Measures Chosen for Each Grade and Season (Measures that have Benchmarks and Norms)?

For each grade, measures were developed, field tested, and normed because they represented key “foundations” of literacy and numeracy, because the content was appropriate for students at that age, and because the measures were highly relevant to instruction and student performance in the grade and season.

How Were the Recommended Screening Measures Chosen?

Star CBM is designed so that for each grade, schools and teachers have one recommended screening measure for reading and one for math based on several data factors from field testing. These measures are marked with an asterisk * for each grade and subject in the table above. The software also prompts the teacher to administer these measures first at the beginning of each seasonal window with the word “Screen” on the screening measure.

Our rationale for a single screening measure for all seasons for each grade rests on two key principles:

• First, consistent with the core logic and use of “universal screening,” we want schools to have simple, efficient, yet robust means of identifying those students who are making good progress toward proficiency in reading and math, while also identifying those students for whom some supplemental or intensive intervention may be needed to reach proficiency.
• Second, we wanted the single screener for each grade to closely sample a central skill that best represents children’s broader learning in reading or math at that point in their schooling. Like any other screening measure, these single measures are designed to efficiently assess progress – not to be exhaustive measures of all skills that might warrant intervention.

We had several criteria for identifying recommended screening measures for each grade based on field testing. Measures were selected that:

• Sampled content that is central to reading or math development for the age of the student.
• Produced a distribution of scores across the full year without floor or ceiling effects (and therefore were usefully assessing students across seasons).
• Had high reliability and low standard errors of measurement (they produced stable and trustworthy estimates of student performance).
• Demonstrated high correlations with external (and often longer) tests of reading and math achievement.
• Were consistent with overall design principles of a General Outcome Measure across the early grades.