Teaching to the Test, Racing to the Test, or Reviewing for the Test: What are the Differences, and Why Does it Matter?

It is that time of year again. End-of-course exams are either being administered to your students or are about to be. These tests are designed to sample content from your state’s standards so policy makers can make inferences about how much of the standards each student learned this year. Students are measured at the end of the year which means the test is cumulative. Another way to think about a standards-based test is that it is measuring how much of the content a student has retained and mastered over the course of the year. This is why it is important to reflect on these three questions:

• Are you teaching to the test;
• Are you racing toward the test; or
• Are you reviewing for the test?

What is all the fuss about, and why does it matter?

One reason I believe our perspective on approaching tests matter is that only around 64% of students who enter a 4-year college graduate. For students who enter a two-year institution, the matriculation rate is even lower. And while there are a multitude of reasons for such statistics, one contributing factor, I suspect, is that we do not historically take the time to teach students how to actively study.

Teaching to the Test

Teaching to the test is generally defined as a narrowing of the curriculum such that teachers are encouraged to teach only standards that are measured on state assessments. I also consider teaching to the test a narrowing of assessment choices used on classroom assessments and homework assignments, which results in an over reliance on multiple-choice item types at the cost of other assessment formats. If you start each day with five or so test-prep questions to work on practicing the multiple-choice item format, but the items are not used to differentiate instruction and grow conceptual understanding of content you might reconsider this practice. In essence, teaching to the test is the continual rote practice of released standardized test “like” content without piecing together the conceptual blockers and connections for the student. Teaching the test has two main issues. First, it results in students who can appear to have mastered select content but who cannot generalize their knowledge in applied real-world contexts, that include writing. These students are not yet thinking and making connections in the content area. Second, students often are not provided access to the breadth and depth of the curriculum which can limit them being ready to succeed in the next grade.

Racing Toward the Test

Racing toward the test can occur if you focus on some units at the expense of others. Maybe you were working with students that needed multiple opportunities to learn so more time was spent reteaching. Maybe your class and you were having fun with some topics. As the test draws closer, the domains (or units) that have not yet been covered are crammed into the last few weeks of the year. This may place an enormous amount of homework and unit cramming onto students’ plates, often while they are in the middle of preparing for other exams. Racing to the test has two issues. First, cramming has been shown in research studies to result in a short-term gain in knowledge. but the brain essentially dumps the information. The information does not move into a student’s long-term memory. Second, learning works best when students have mastered precursor knowledge upon which to make a connection to the next more advanced topic. When we cram in the last unit(s), we lose focus on ensuring students have retained what we have already covered. And, as an unintended consequence, we are teaching students to cram which does not promote the necessary, needed life-long skill of how to study for cumulative mastery.

Reviewing for the Test

Reviewing for an end-of-course assessment is a process you can begin approximately two weeks prior to the assessment after having taught the full curriculum. Teachers who engage in this process are helping students learn how to study. It does not hurt to talk through these study practices with students to help them prepare for their road ahead, post-high school.

The use of multiple low stakes tests at the end of the year can promote student learning by asking students to retrieve and apply previously learned material in a variety of assessment formats. During a two-week review, focus on providing students opportunities to make connections across the units that were studied. Consider beginning with low stakes cumulative testing or a quiz series as a refresher and diagnostic tool for the first two days. Such assessment events should use interleaving. Interleaving means that questions are arranged so that the sequence does not cue what decision making is needed to respond correctly to questions. Tag your questions to a unit, textbook chapter, or standard to support determining where a student needs to study, but do not present the questions in this order. Mix topics up! After the initial cumulative test or quizzes and an analysis of which units, chapters, or standards need “tuning up,” consider approaches such as the following:

• Have students correct mistakes and then explain the concept for homework, after you have reviewed the answers with the class. For example, if a student is unable to compare 2/3 and 3/4 when given a 3X4 array of squares that represent a whole, have students create models, translate the model to a different representation, and explain the process for converting fractions with different denominators to the same denominator. Also check that students understand and can explain that the denominator represents the parts of the whole.
• Give students credit for correcting their mistakes and their reflection.
• Consider dividing students into groups based on what students need to “tune up.”
• Engage small group study sessions on specific topics using constructed response review questions, but have each student write or model their own responses. The questions should center students on the critical big ideas that need to be refreshed from the “tune up” units.

Older students can take notes on concepts they need to remember, and for younger students you might assign them some additional independent practice of key areas of the curriculum during the first week. I also like asking students to create four sample assessment items with a model correct answer to give to their study group peers as homework. What student does not love creating a quiz? The sneaky part of such an endeavor is that you are having students create, analyze, and think critically about “touch-up” topics that refresh the concepts in students’ long-term memory.  While this can be less useful for a content area such as reading, such an approach can help students retrieve and remember grammar rules. For week 1 remember

• forgetting is part of learning,
• the practice of spacing study over a longer period is critical to support moving information into students’ long-term memory, and
• students need opportunities writing down the information they need to practice retrieving in addition to selected-response quizzes.

For week 2, design tasks that engage students in deep, real-world connections to the content across the units. For example, if your students are studying Human Geography, an article such as the New York Times and Fuller Project collaboration, “The Brutality of Sugar: Debt, Child Marriage, and Hysterectomies” is a wonderful, yet sad article that connects to many big ideas of the course: globalization, economic sectors, world systems theory, and the effect of a country’s economic development on the roles and lives of women. How many connections to big ideas can students write about, model, or include in a PowerPoint presentation? At this stage, allowing students to choose how they show what they know is the goal to get them to output as many connections and details as possible in a way that most engages them. Then let them use their textbooks to augment. Finally, have students take another set of low stakes cumulative assessments with corrections of errors to obtain additional credit.

Taking two weeks at the end of the year to review what you covered helps students learn to study. They reimport content they forgot. Please share why you are doing what you are doing! Whether you love or hate standardized assessments, if you are a teacher, doctor, lawyer, airplane pilot, or project management professional you likely had to study and take assessments measuring your content knowledge to get where you are today. And the content you were measured on likely comprised more than a years’ worth of learning!

We can approach the yearly end-of-course assessments in ways that are more or less positive. I hope you value the positive benefits of taking time with students to review, which helps students engage in the retention and transfer of learning. We can take this moment to help students grow. When you take this perspective, you stop focusing on the other uses of educational large-scale assessments. Instead, you focus on the opportunity to model and teach the active, healthy, mindful strategies students can use throughout their lives to study and retain information about large bodies of important content. The students will not think of thanking you, but on behalf of parents everywhere, please allow me to do so. Thank you!