Standardized Assessment (I am a manager and my plan, below, is one for working with the teachers who administer standardized tests.)
Our students are assessed using the TABE. We have made the test-taking environment and structure more flexible in response to seeing test scores that were significantly lower than expected. We do the assessment on Mondays, when students are more likely to be rested. We offer students the option of taking the entire TABE on one day or just a single section of it each day. Students can also take longer breaks between sections if they need.
Many students need to retake one or more sections of the TABE and they receive focused instruction on the skills they need to improve. We haven’t thought about ways to help students prepare for the test itself. After reading about strategies to improve student performance on standardized tests, I plan to work with my staff to work on test-taking strategies with their students who will be re-taking the TABE. I’m very interested in seeing how students approach re-testing after learning strategic approaches to taking the TABE. I think that students’ self-confidence will be strengthened if they have a toolbox of skills they can bring with them when they re-take the TABE.
I will share the article, How to Do Your Best on Standardized Tests: Some Suggestions for Adult Learners, with my staff. We can select approaches from the strategies described and put together a roll-out plan for teaching these approaches to the students who are already involved in studying to improve their reading, language, computation or applied math TABE scores. Preparing for the test itself can become part of the re-test process.
For example, the article suggests the following strategies:
Listen carefully to direction
Scan the test before starting to answer questions
Stay as calm as you can
Students can practice these approaches and discuss them with their teachers as they are working on their core skills. We can evaluate the usefulness of the test-taking strategies by asking students how helpful they felt the strategies were to them in improving both their confidence and test scores.