How to Prepare Students Efficiently for Standardized Testing?

Standardized testing has become a common practice in every classroom. There are some strategies to help you prepare your students to take these often-stressful tests. The tips focus on reducing student stress and integrating test preparation into everyday teaching.

Align Your Tutoring

• To make sure your teaching is aligned with the skills that students will be tested on.
• By aligning your teaching with test content, you can help your students get as much practice as possible with the skills to be evaluated.

Use Tools in a Targeted Way

• You can design tests within your content that more authentically give students practice.
• Socrato is a web-based test preparation platform used for scoring practice standardized exams and generating analytic and diagnostic performance reports.

Analyze Your Data and Model How to Use It Informatively

• Don’t be scared to analyze your own data. Use this tool to make prepping more efficient.
• Read and understand the data about your prior and current students.
• Determine your lessons not on what you haven’t yet taught, but rather on what the data shows they don’t understand.
• Combine this with the knowledge of what you know you need to work on, and attention on those weaknesses.
• Analyze on what your students don’t get and what might not come naturally for you.

Show Them the Diagnostic Report and Set Individual Goals

• Ownership is a massive part of success.
• Have each student examine their previous scores, setting goals that they agree to reach for.
• Subject-wise, topics-wise, difficulty-level, depth-wise report, if students see that only one or two more questions answered correctly might have put them in a higher category.

Give Them Plans for When They Want to Give Up

• Teach them how to chunk text so that they tackle little bites at a time.
• Teach them how to break sentences down into their parts so that they can highlight the subject.
• By the analysis of diagnostic report, you can teach them how to visualize the concept or gist of a passage.
• Teach them how to activate prior knowledge or make connections to the material.

Build Confidence

• At test time, there’s nothing you can do but say, “You’re ready.”
• There’s no magic bullet, but when a teacher says with assurance, “You’ve worked hard, and this is just a way to show others what I already get to see every day.

To understand this tool tutor can use Socrato to practice online and get insights beyond scores.