Are your test reviews not working? Here's how I get THAT kid in your classroom to pass his tests!

“Test prep” is a bit of a dirty word in public education. Time spent in a classroom doing explicit test preparation work is implied to be time wasted – time spent, not on educational goals, but on hazy “good test-taker” skills. Skills like eliminating the distractor answer choices, using the answers from the previous questions to inform your guesses, getting good sleep the night before – to be honest I’m not sure exactly what behaviors our “good” test takers engage in. I only know that we feel we need to spend time actively teaching our students how to be one.

And, the truth is, we do. Your intervention students are not good test takers. You DO need to spend time actively teaching them how to become good test takers. But not by spending class periods doing intensive, specific “test prep” – whatever that might be. A good test-taker is a good test-taker because he or she is able to connect together a wide range of information and apply it to the context of a question. A bad test-taker cannot connect the activity you did in class to the vocabulary words you assigned last week to the test question today. Which leads to that most frustrating of feelings - you feel they do know the material, so why can't they pass the test?

Effective test prep is creating explicit connections between the content you’ve taught and the test questions. Once you give students the connections – and a strategy to remind them how to use those connections – you will see a marked increase in your test scores.

Here’s how I increase biology EOC scores with my school’s most at-risk student populations by creating explicit connections between vocabulary and the test.

Step 1: Identify your key vocabulary words in your targeted standard

Let's take as an example biology standard 9A: Compare the structures and functions of different types of biomolecules, including carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids.

There are some clear non negotiable vocabulary that I know for a fact the STAAR EOC is going to test. Some of them are given to me there in the standard

Carbohydrates

Lipids

Proteins

Nucleic acids

But those words themselves have non-negotiable vocabulary words that a student must know in order to understand those concepts. For example:

Carbohydrates-> sugars

Lipids -> fatty acids

Proteins->amino acids

Nucleic Acids -> nucleotides

Identify your non-negotiable key vocabulary words. Be precise and targeted, and don’t overwhelm them with vocabulary. We don’t need them to know everything just halfway. We need to them to know what they know very well.

Step 2: Create a concept map.

To see my sample map in its entirety click here.

Or read on to see how I use this map with my students.

The structure of this map here illustrates the biomolecules listed in the standard with a link to the compounds that make them (the structure: sugar, fatty acids, nuleotides, and amino acids) and what the molecule does (the function: creates energy, stores energy, genes, and traits). 

I’ve included some distractor words – such as the chemical names for sugar end in –ose – to lower the probability that the test will “trick” my students. To lay the groundwork for the next targeted standard I’ve included vocabulary words that move beyond the scope of the standard – beginning the spiraling process for cellular parts (nucleus, ribosomes, cell membrane, mitochondria).

If you know biology content, this map makes sense to you. If you don't know biology content - it's okay. Although the goal of this map is to teach biology content - you can still use the map to answer test questions even if you're not perfectly clear on the content. 

I use concept maps to create explicit mental and spatial connections between the vocabulary words and the words they are most likely to be linked to on a test. Not only does the map make the connections between disparate vocabulary words explicit, it will warm your heart when you see your students look up from their tests and start using their hands to redraw the locations of the words in the air.

Step 3: Get out the highlighters and practice using the content in context.

I have to break my students of some of their poor test-taking strategies they’ve learned in the past. Highlighting is a very common test-taking strategy. And it is without doubt the most effective strategy for content-based exams. And also the most useless if not taught properly. Our students will use this strategy in every way from highlighting an entire question, highlighting the words they don’t know, or highlighting the directions. I always get rueful laughter from my students when I tell them I can always tell who is going to fail a test when I see them highlighting like crazy.

Students must be trained to highlight only the vocabulary words you have taught them have connections to the answers. By using this strategy your students will a) actually read the question and b) critically read the question. And once they’ve done that, you’ve done it.

Let’s look at this question from a released biology EOC.

The reading level of this question is very high. It is filled with intimidating words to make your intervention students give up and put their heads down, along with very clever distractors to confuse your higher performing students. Let’s see how this question looks with key vocabulary words highlighted.

Now instead of struggling with a difficult reading question, the right answer pops right out. Protein is directly linked to amino acids, and the other answer choices do not contain any connections. The correct answer is B. (Science people – notice that even if you had included adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine on this map connected to nitrogen base, it wouldn’t have mattered. The answer would still have been obvious.)

Let’s try another one.

Another difficult question with a lot of distracting science vocabulary meant to intimidate and confuse. This question is not technically linked to 9A - but thanks to the intentional spiraling of other standards, combined with a student who confidently knows what they know, the correct answer is still revealed. 

Highlighting reveals that what this question is looking for is an understanding of how the mitochondria creates energy. Using only this concept map, two answer choices reveal connections: F and J. 

For choice J students see that mitochondria is connected to energy, that ATP is another name for energy, and that glucose ends in –ose so it is a sugar. Even if the learning stopped right there, students could feel more confident in selecting J than F since F contains the incorrect "carbon dioxide".

The explicit connections enabled your struggling readers to fight through the questions and stay focused on what they know is true about mitochondria. The mitochondria creates energy from sugar. But it does that with glucose, not with carbon dioxide. 

 Now PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE.

This is test prep that works. Test prep that creates authentic learning experiences – even within the inauthentic confines of multiple choice exams.

• ·         Students are actually learning the content
• ·         They are learning how to apply the content
• ·         They are passing tests and feeling successful

Don't defeat yourself and your students by thinking of high stakes test prep as a mandatory all-learning-stops time in your classroom. See it as a chance to target standard must-knows and let students realize how much they actually have learned in your class.