About What Kidsa are Reading 2025 Our very own Gene Kerns penned the Introduction to this year's report, which shares the reading habits of 5 million K--12 students, from 21,259 schools across all 50 states and DC, who read 173 million books during the 2023--2024 school year. This year's report explores the importance of kids spending 15 minutes on reading practice daily--a manageable amount for busy readers that our data show is the sweet spot to see real gains in terms of literacy achievement and vocabulary exposure. Two new report features highlight our findings, The Magic of 15 Purposeful Minutes spread on pp. 8--9, and the research questions and answers found in our four new Inspired to Read spreads kicking off each section of the report: What Kids are Reading is organized by grade range, with each section beginning with an Inspired to Read spread bursting with reading motivation. At the top of these pages, we've included two book lists: (1) Recognizing Resilience, featuring an array of stories whose characters display grit and tenacity, allowing readers to feel seen as well as broaden their understanding and empathy for others, and (2) Series Sets, where we've highlighted a book series for each grade level that was read by students who also favored a series from the Top Print list for that grade. Spanning the bottom of these pages, we explore The Magic of 15 Purposeful Minutes by examining the impact of kids spending just 15 minutes per day reading, using data from our Accelerated Reader database for the 2023--2024 school year. The following page begins with a Teacher Recommendation, from a reading survey conducted in January 2025 of educators spanning all grade levels, who answered a short series of questions regarding student book reading. Then, a map displaying Signature Books, that ranked higher in popularity in each state than they did nationwide, and four Fresh Finds, comprising books that kids first quizzed on during Fall 2024. Each individual grade level includes a Highest Rated book that received the most stars from kids in that grade who opted to rate books on a 4-point scale after reading and quizzing. Next up, two ranked booklists, Top Print (from Accelerated Reader) and Popular Digital (from myON), both display books by series, where appropriate, to allow as many unique authors and titles on the lists as possible. The myON books also do not repeat from grade to grade to include even more distinct titles. Finally, each grade level features a curated list of Authentic Spanish texts. The Full Report and additional information is available online: <https://www.renaissance.com/wkar>.

From the Introduction: "To provide optimal power and usefulness within our Star Assessments and many of our practice products, Renaissance takes a unique approach to content creation through the development of custom learning progressions. In general, learning progressions are descriptions of successively more sophisticated ways of thinking about key disciplinary concepts and practices across multiple grades, which outline intermediate steps toward expertise (Pellegrino, 2011). Learning progressions lay out in words and examples what it means to move toward more expert understanding (Wilson & Bertenthal 2005) in a subject area. While not unlike a traditional scope and sequence, learning progressions are far more thoughtfully developed and emphasize a holistic, cross-grades focus."The Full Report is available online: <https://renaissance.widen.net/s/jdm9kgx5cw/780549-lpfocusskills-whitepaper>.

The purpose of this project is to statistically link the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) and Star Assessments scales in order to facilitate the conversion of MAP RIT scores to Star scaled scores. Linkages were completed between MAP Reading to Star Reading, MAP Language Usage to Star Reading, and MAP Math to Star Math. The resulting conversion table makes it possible for present or future Star users to translate their MAP RIT scores to Star scores.The full report is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R57878>.

This technical manual is a compendium of all relevant information about content and item development, item and scale calibration, reliability and measurement precision, validity, norming, and score definitions for Star Math High School (Algebra and Geometry).Email research@renaissance.com to request a copy of the technical manual from the Renaissance Research Department.

From the abstract: "Nearpod contracted with LearnPlatform by Instructure, a third-party edtech research company, to examine whether usage of Nearpod was associated with improved outcomes for students during the 2021-22 school year in a large urban district. LearnPlatform designed the study to satisfy Level III requirements (Promising Evidence) according to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015; USDE, 2016)."The study is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R67132>.

From the abstract: "In Pennsylvania, high school students are required to take Keystone exams associated with Keystone courses; participation prior to graduation is required for federal accountability purposes. The School District of Philadelphia's Board of Education's Goal 4 is focused on improving the reading and math performance of grades 9-11 students on the Keystones. To track progress toward the Goal, the District examines the performance of students on 'Leading Indicators,' the within-year assessments of reading and math skills administered multiple times between the annual Keystone exams. This report examines the statistical relationship of Winter and Spring Star performance and Keystone performance in 2021-22."The Full Report is available online: <https://www.philasd.org/research/wp-content/uploads/sites/90/2023/03/Analysis-of-the-Relationship-between-2021-22-Star-and-Keystone-Performance-March-2023.pdf>.

Throughout 2021, Renaissance released a series of reports titled How Kids Are Performing, which estimated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on US student achievement in reading and mathematics during the 2020-2021 school year. Although the incidence of school shutdowns and remote learning is now much lower during the 2021-2022 school year than the prior year, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect K-12 education in myriad ways. This continuation of the How Kids Are Performing report series will serve as a status check, summarizing US K-12 student performance and growth as of the end of the 2021-2022 school year and contrasting those results to the same period in 2020-2021.The full report is available online: <https://www.renaissance.com/how-kids-are-performing/>.

Throughout 2021, Renaissance released a series of reports titled How Kids Are Performing, which estimated the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on US student achievement in reading and mathematics during the 2020-2021 school year. Although the incidence of school shutdowns and remote learning is now much lower during the 2021-2022 school year than last year, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect K-12 education in myriad ways. This continuation of the How Kids Are Performing report series will serve as a status check, summarizing US K-12 student performance and growth as of the middle of the 2021-2022 school year and contrasting those results to the same period in 2020-2021. The report is available online: <https://www.renaissance.com/how-kids-are-performing/>.

Accelerated Reader is a progress-monitoring system that provides feedback on the comprehension of books and other materials that students have read. It also tracks student reading over time. Currently, more than 180,000 different Accelerated Reader quizzes have been developed and are in use. This report provides reliability and validity data for Accelerated Reader quizzes. The reliability analyses use a large database of nearly 1 million quiz records. Validity is established through correlations with scores from 24 standardized reading tests and through a study that confirms that the quizzes are effective at discriminating between instances of students having read the book versus not having read the book. The report also includes descriptions of the purpose and intended classroom use of Accelerated Reader, descriptions of the types of quizzes, and the processes for quiz development. The report is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R35806>.

From the report: "The 2018 surveys documented that teachers and students believed Flocabulary contributed to high academic engagement and positively influenced student learning in the classroom. Students particularly enjoyed the use of music and visuals in Flocabulary videos."The full study is available online: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.flocabulary.com/school-and-district/Engagement%20Paper_October%202018.pdf>

From the abstract: "STAR (Star Reading and Star Math), the products from a software company, Renaissance, are used for screening and progress-monitoring overtime. An alignment was completed by Renaissance between STAR and MCA, the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment, for grades 3 through 8. This research study will help contribute to the research of alignment between STAR and MCA. This research is predicting the expected STAR scores by season for student proficiency in MCA reading and math at 50% and 90% probability levels. The STAR scores needed to achieve 50% and 90% chance of MCA proficiency for each season will be calculated in this study. Overall, the STAR scores needed are increasing overtime. When a student is predicted to be non-proficient, this student will receive extra help. It is important to prevent the chances of predicting the wrong students to be MCA proficiency because they will not receive extra supports. For this purpose, a better probability cutoff (75%) will be suggested through this study."Citation: Cha, L. X. (2018). Alignment between STAR and MCA for grades 10 and 11.The Full Report is available online: <https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=school_district_data>.

From the abstract: "Computer adaptive assessments were used to monitor the academic status and growth of students with emotional behavior disorders (EBD) in reading (N = 321) and math (N = 322) in a regional service center serving 56 school districts. A cohort sequential model was used to compare that performance to the status and growth of a national user base of more than 7,500,000 students without disabilities. Consistent with numerous previous findings, status or level of performance of students with EBD was consistently low relative to their nondisabled peers. However, for the most part the students with significant EBD demonstrated rates of growth similar to the nationwide sample of nondisabled peers. There was considerable variability in the academic growth of students across grades and between treatment programs, and this variability is described and discussed. Implications for policy and practice in student progress monitoring and teacher evaluation systems are discussed." Citation: Ysseldyke, J., Scerra, C., Stickney, E., Beckler, A., Dituri, J., & Ellis, K. (2017). Academic growth expectations for students with emotional and behavior disorders. Psychology in the Schools, 54(8), 792-807.

To develop Pathway to Proficiency reports for Arkansas Star Reading Enterprise and Star Math Enterprise schools, we linked our scaled scores with the scaled scores from the ACT Aspire achievement test. This technical report details the statistical method behind the process of linking ACT Aspire and Star Reading and Star Math scaled scores. The full report is available online: <https://docs.renaissance.com/R45710>.