STAR implications and issues. An analysis of data gathered from the supplementary test of achievement in reading.

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that the data generated from the New Zealand Supplementary Test of Achievement in Reading or STAR (Eller, 2001) may not be conducive to helping teachers identity specific learning needs at the individual level. We further contend that the main use of the data
obtained from the STAB is the presentation of the results as aggregated stanines to show large group performance trends. To obtain a more in-depth understanding of the causes of low scores on the STAR we suggest that teachers might need to undertake an analysis of individual performances Such an analysis was the focus of this paper and the results showed that for the two sub-bests analysed Sentence Comprehension and vocabulary knowledge the overriding problem was related to poor decoding ability. This was a surprising result given that all the students in the sample had scored 90% or better on the Word Recogniton (STAR) sub-test.