Teachers report spending as much as 20 to 50 percent of the school year preparing students for tests and assessments, including learning test language and format, and practicing multiple choice questions. You could win back more time for learning by incorporating testing more organically within your daily lessons.
Tips for getting students ready for testing:
- Use formative assessments
- Foster a growth mindset
- Teach mindfulness
Use formative assessments
Formative assessments provide a real-time look at how your students grasp content which you can use to improve your teaching and develop a growth mindset in your students. Pear Deck is one tool that makes it easy to add formative testing into your daily classroom activities with resources to build interactive questions and exit tickets into your presentations right from Google Slides. You can also easily share results with your students, so they can understand what areas they need to spend more time studying. Consider creating pre-tests that showcase how much students have learned after a chapter test. This involvement in their progress, especially as they start reviewing content that for assessments, will build students’ confidence on test day.
Foster growth mindsets
By getting students involved in a test prep plan, setting performance goals, and having performance check-ins, they can see what they’ve accomplished and hopefully feel their confidence building. This self-awareness can help you develop growth mindsets.
Teach mindfulness
By building a test prep schedule with students, you can proactively get ahead on alleviating testing anxiety; however, no matter the amount of prep work, students will feel stressed about performing well. Teaching mindfulness activities can help students deal with test-day jitters.
Mindfulness activities for students:
- Practice controlled breathing
- Imagine positive test outcomes
- Create a one-minute calming environment
A one-minute calming environment is a technique students can use to quickly clear their mind and get back into testing with a calmer frame of mind.
What test prep tips do you have? Share with us in the comments below.
Sources:
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/preparing-students-state-standardized-tests
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