Ugly truth. Standardized tests matter.

I f—-ing hate them, but it’s not up to me whether or not my students take them. And I needed to help them be ready.

In my district, ninth graders take the MAP, and those scores are used as the primary metric for determining everything from funding to placement to teacher effectiveness. Ironically, we’re told not to teach to the test (snort). Eleventh graders take the ACT, and many of them have reported back to me that they had NO IDEA how to tackle the questions on the test; they were upset that all our group work projects hadn’t prepared them, which made me feel terrible.

I needed to figure out a way to teach kids how to tackle standardized test questions that fit logically into the rest of our unit. Stopping and practicing test-taking as a separate lesson pulled too much time away from the other parts of the day…and felt artificial. I needed to embed the practice in a way that killed two birds with one stone.

Then, it hit me. Daily review questions over the reading, written in standardized test format! No papers to grade or clunky online practice, just a slideshow with questions I could use to call on kids to answer. I could have them talk through how they came to their answer and discuss strategies for tackling the questions (substitution, elimination, skimming). I could give them a comprehension grade for their participation in talking through that reasoning while also reviewing key passages and concepts from the prior days’ reading! They would get ongoing, repeated practice in tackling those tricky questions while also getting a solid review of the reading. Hooray!

Not going to lie. This took me FOREVER to write. Choosing passages for close reading from the text was one of the greatest challenges. However, my ninth graders performed SO MUCH BETTER on the Winter MAP after participating in this form of daily practice. We all felt better. By starting each class period with questions about reading from the day before, we all had the story fresh in our minds as we went into the day’s reading. It helped so much.

Here’s a link to the product on TpT; you can access a preview of the chapter 1 questions for it totally free from there!

Tags: standardized test prep, MAP, ACT, review questions, multiple choice questions, close reading, test preparation, testing strategies, reading check, secondary ELA, enraged2engaged, E2E