High Stakes Test Prep Begins Now

No matter your opinion or how you feel about it, it’s test taking season for many schools.  Whether taking an online or in-person exam, these tedious exams often impact student outcomes, teacher evaluation and school funding.  Like it or not, state-mandated testing is a big deal. 

When I was in the classroom, I can remember the pressure I would feel each year knowing some of my students would do well while others may barely make it sitting there quietly that long.  Not to mention the standard interruptions that would have to be documented and make the entire thing way more stressful.  (Like having a lice bug fall on a student’s desk and the student screaming in the middle of a test. I’m itchy just thinking about it.)

Throughout my experience, I’ve learned that taking tests requires its own set of skills.  Most of the lengthy tests our students take for the state are not like the standard ones we give to guide our instruction throughout the year.  So we end up spending weeks giving practice tests so that they can be familiar with the structure.

But what if we practiced effective test-taking skills all year long that didn’t feel like test prep?  Believe it or not, we can definitely do this in 5 easy ways.

Use Mind-Mapping for Long-Term Memory

Mind-mapping has been an amazing visual skill that helps people to organize their thinking.  It helps to connect ideas and bridge them together.  I use them as a way for students to jot down everything they remember before a test.  I’ve even done it at the end of the year to help students recall information from the beginning of the year.  

Here’s how it works:

Provide a group (3-6 students) with a large piece of paper and markers or crayons.  

Put a topic in the middle like Fractions, Decimals or even Multiplication.

Encourage them to draw lines and bubbles off the main idea to write anything they remember.  They can write a word, draw a picture or give an example.

Ask students to continue by adding additional comments to each other’s ideas.  They may clarify or correct misconceptions by editing.  

After about 5 minutes, rotate the papers to another group.  This allows students to see someone else’s ideas and continue editing and adding.  

I usually do this 2-3 times reducing the amount spent in each group as more comments are added.

You can do this for several topics before the state-mandated tests to help students activate old memories and recall all that they have learned this year.

Read for Information 

Beyond an ELA test, most students are going to be reading a lot of informational writing especially on a math assessment.  This is one of the hardest types of reading to tackle and often includes the need to infer missing steps or information.  

When preparing students for these types of questions, we have to help them read for meaning just like we do in a reading lesson.  If you begin modeling it in your day-to-day lessons as a think aloud and encouraging your students to do the same, it will become an automatic process that they are applying all the time.  

Here are some of my favorite ways to think like a reading teacher:

Underline key words that tell the story, not the math.  These are usually nouns and verbs that highlight what’s happening.

Stop at punctuation and retell to yourself: Every comma and every period, I stop and think if what I read made sense.

Always go back to the question: Did I answer what I was trying to find out?

Implementing these strategies right now can help students practice the skills necessary to tackle these challenging problems now.

Navigate Multiple Choice Answers

Multiple choice questions are usually a gotcha moment.  Either you get it right or you get it wrong.  There’s no partial credit.  

That’s why it’s vital that students have opportunities to understand how to reason through the options, cross off extraneous information and work with the most likely answers.  They need to know when to plug in and how to narrow it down to a 50/50 shot.  

Taken from an awesome mentor, Hoover, you can easily include multiple choice options during your classroom discussion by using their varying answers as choices.  Throw in the additional options of: All of These or None of These and you have a great opportunity for students to analyze possible options.

Prepare for Short Answer and Constructed Responses

When students complete these types of problems, we want them to get as many points as possible.  Students need to know what a quality response looks like.  If we only do this during state test prep, they will never feel the need to truly explain.  They will assume it’s just a testing skill.

Instead, we can include these types of questions in our exit tickets, chapter assessments and even journaling options.  (If you haven’t taken my on-demand math notebook courses, you can see these in action in minutes.)

Giving students opportunities to practice this requires that we set them up for success with exemplars.  We need to show them what we expect to see and what should be included with a rubric that makes sense.  You can definitely use mine from my Math Notebooks or create one with your students. 

Either way, you want students to analyze their own work and get used to explaining their thinking fully.  By the time they get to the state test, they have already been creating quality work examples all year long.

Get the Right Mindset

If we are teaching quality instruction and constantly providing our students with amazing feedback, state type testing should not be a surprise.  It should line up with what we see daily, with the rare exception of a student who just didn’t perform well that day.  

That’s why it’s important that we stress that any type of testing is an opportunity to show our students how amazing they are.  These are the moments where all the stakeholders (parents, administrators, and school boards) get to see the progress our students have made.  We want to celebrate this opportunity and take a bit of the stress off.

I do not take these things lightly and know there can be a lot of pressure to get the best scores, but I also know that those tests don’t define a teacher or a student.  It’s the day-to-day understanding and process that shows what students really know.  

If we are doing these things every day, we will see the growth and it will show up in the data.  Try out these strategies as you go through this season and see how you might implement them all year long. Know that I'm here rooting you and your students on every step of the way!

You've got this!

If you want to see these more in depth, check out the video below: