SLIDE 23 A technical note on SBA vs STAR
23
- Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBA) and STAR are both standardized, computer‐adaptive
tests.
- SBA is required by the state in grades 3‐8 and 10 or 11, and is given once per year in the spring.
- STAR is a short national test that the district chooses to use. Since we give it in both fall and
spring, we get an annual growth measure for each student.
- BSD has been giving SBA for the past three years, and STAR for the past five years.
- STAR is both a standards‐based test and a normed test, meaning that it will tell us whether a
student met a certain set of academic standards, and how that student performed relative to peers nationally.
- From 2013‐2015, STAR used the state’s MSP standards as a basis for determining
whether a student met standard.
- Once the state switched from MSP tests to SBA tests, STAR also updated its standards to
reflect the more rigorous SBA test, in 2016. (STAR’s underlying scale score remained the same, it merely shifted the cut scores determining whether a student was considered Well Below Standard, Below Standard, At Standard, or Above Standard.)
- In order to maintain a consistent measure over time, this report uses STAR’s SBA
standards for all five years. In the past we have used the MSP standards as our consistent measure over time, so the STAR numbers in this report will differ from those in prior year reports.
- In this report, we use SBA tests to look at the extent to which students are meeting state
standards; and we use STAR tests to look at trends over time.
