A good article by Bailey on how to leverage MCAS material to supplement classroom or home instruction.
Teachers and tutors can leverage any state standardized test material, or even National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) material. After each assessment, NAEP releases dozens of sample questions to the public—more than 2,000 questions are currently available to be used in classrooms, as homework, or for assessments. These questions are of high quality and additional details are tagged to each item, such as subject classification, difficulty, and performance on the question by region and various demographics.
While working with teachers we repeatedly hear how they print the questions from these websites; then they go through a tedious process of cut-and-paste to create custom assessments and worksheets for specific subject areas. This inspired us to create the QuestionCart tool in Socrato. The QuestionCart allows teachers (and anyone else) to search questions for MCAS and other exams by grade, question type, state standards, and other options. Teachers can then add the questions to a QuestionCart similar to a shopping cart experience on other websites. Once the question cart is populated, a teacher can click a button to convert those questions into an assessment test or printable worksheet with one click. No more cut and paste!
