When preparing for
the state test, it can pretty daunting to determine which are your priority
objectives. Best case scenario, you have
been tracking student progress all year and have a good approximation of how your
students will perform on a standardized test. Worst case, you are just prepping
for the test and it is days away. If for some reason I was thrown into a class
room with 10 days until the test, this would be my go to plan to help my
students.
Tip 1: Find your test benchmarks and blueprints.
Most states or
departments of education should have a breakdown of the items on a test. I work
in Tennessee, so unfortunately, after the testing debacle of 2016, there are no
old tests to pull from. All I had were these benchmarks to help guide my teachers. If you don't have
blue prints or benchmarks with an item breakdown, take the time to go through
an old test and mark which objectives are being tested. It will give you a snapshot on which
objectives are likely to show up on that test.
Tip 2: Identify your
Priority standards
In our planning
session, I had them identify which objectives would give them the most bang for
their buck.
In the Common Core
Math Standards, there are 25 third grade standards, 27 fourth grade standards,
and 26 fifth grade standards. While you can address them all in a spiraled
review, more in-depth review should be focused on the high leverage objectives.Frankly, some of the
standards don't lend themselves to the tested multiple choice format. Spend
more of your time on concrete and discrete math skills than the more conceptual
math items. Below is the sheet I created to help my teachers focus on which objectives they would be teaching.
Tip 3: Prepare Assessments
Once you have
identified the standards, it's time to plan teaching and assessment. It should
go without saying that drill and kill is probably not the way to go. Multiple
choice tests on top of tests are exhausting for students and also exhausts your
resources of multiple choice questions. Really food questions are hard to come
by and even though you can modify them to make more, there really only so many
oranges someone can buy at the grocery store. They walked through the Tackling
the Test sheet and identified 10 objectives that they would focus on. 10 was
chosen because it seemed manageable for the teachers, and that they could find
10 multiple choice questions to give for a pre-test and a post-test.
Now that you have 10
standards with 10 questions each, it should really take down some of the stress
level of testing. Sure there are dozens of ways to remediate and you can
agonize over if you chose the right one or not, but honestly, pick your horse
and ride it. Stick with your ten, dig in, and try to make the review as fun and
student centered as possible.
As for timing, I
would do this on a Friday/ Saturday so that I could have time to adequately
plan the review. This also means I am worried about the first half of my review
only, NOT the entire set. Always remember to give yourself grace, and time for
your normal life. Hopefully, identifying standards will help to streamline your
test review practice and help you to feel more in control of your testing
season.
Hope these tips helped! For the free worksheets, click here.
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