Implement these strategies throughout the school year to help students prepare for spring exams.
Great instruction every day. It's our mantra for what teachers can do, on a daily basis, to see growth in student outcomes by the end of the year.
By delivering great instruction every day – instead of cramming in a few test prep sessions in February or March – teachers can help students hone and improve on the critical reading and thinking skills that assessments often evaluate. While great instruction every day can take many forms, these straight-forward strategies are sure to help students do their best on spring assessments.
Test-taking strategies that can be applied to instruction throughout the school year:
- Analyze errors in multiple choice questions – Help train students to identify the distractors presented in answer options on standardized tests. You can start by asking them to look back at a multiple choice question they got wrong in your class: Why was the answer incorrect? Perhaps it was an option that mimics language found in the text but doesn't actually answer the question.
- Read texts carefully to make predictions – Show your students how to approach certain questions as opportunities to read a text more carefully. For instance, a prediction strategy would work when students have the text in front of them and can find the answer in the text before they look at the multiple choice answer options.
- Annotate informational texts– Most teachers encourage annotation already, but many students don't take advantage of the practice when it comes to assessments. You can help your students by giving them a key for annotation – maybe an underline means "main idea" and circling means "supporting details."
That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. We'll be diving more into these strategies – and best implementation practices for them – at our upcoming webinar, "Tackling Spring Assessments through Great Instruction Every Day."