Preparing Students for Testing

Informing and Motivating Students

One way to help ensure that students' test scores represent their true achievement levels is to make sure students are well prepared. They should understand why the tests are being given, what the test tasks are like, and why there should be no reason for them to feel anxious about testing. Teachers can do much to make certain that their students' experiences with standardized achievement tests will result in positive attitudes toward testing, good feelings about themselves as test takers, and, consequently, accurate test results.

Students who have been told why they are being tested are likely to concentrate and try harder than those who have no idea how their scores will be used. Students should be told how the results will be used by their teacher to determine students' year-to-year progress. They should be told how the scores will be used by their teacher to decide where each student needs more help and where each one has made particularly good progress. They should be told that the results can help them and their parents understand how their schoolwork is going. They should also be told that the results will be helpful to the principal, counselors, and other school workers who need information about how children are doing in school. Of course, how much students should be told and how the ideas should be presented depend somewhat on their maturity levels.

Students who have not taken tests of this type before will no doubt benefit from some discussion about test-taking procedures. For example, they need to know such things as how to use a separate answer folder, how to mark their answers, how to pace themselves, and what to do if they don't know the answer to a question. For most groups of students, the directions at the beginning of testing and immediately before each individual test will be sufficient for reviewing or learning these skills. Students also need to know that they will be expected to work independently: not look at the answer folders of others, not show their own answer folder to others, not give any responses aloud, and not ask the teacher for answers. All of these ideas can be talked about in a group discussion and then reinforced during the practice session.

Most students will encounter some test questions that will be too difficult for them. They should be told in advance that they are not expected to know the answers to all the questions and that it is acceptable to make no mark for a question. At the same time they should be encouraged to persevere and not to give up too quickly. Though random marking of answers should not be allowed, students should be encouraged to make "thoughtful guesses" in response to individual questions. If these ideas about difficulty and guessing are discussed briefly before testing actually begins, few students, if any, will become anxious during testing simply because they don't know which answer to choose.

Despite the care taken at school to create a positive atmosphere for testing and to allay students' concerns, as testing time approaches, pressure from parents or siblings may foster feelings of uneasiness or self-doubt in some students. Much of this can be prevented if parents have been informed about the purposes of testing, the nature of the tests, and the type of support they could provide. The pamphlet A Message to Parents explains the purposes for testing, provides samples of what the questions are like, and furnishes guidelines to parents for preparing students.

Most children are curious learners by nature and are proud to demonstrate what they have learned. Thus, special motivational techniques to encourage students to do their best on the tests generally are not needed. Most students will be self-motivated to do their best on the tests, as they are for most other instructional activities. In fact, placing too much emphasis on the importance of the tests in an attempt to motivate students is likely to yield unintended and unwanted responses -- high anxiety, fear of making mistakes, or resistance to test-taking.

As some students progress through the middle school or junior high years, their motivation to perform well on standardized achievement tests tends to diminish somewhat. At that age, students seem more ready to question the purpose for testing and to wonder what the personal significance of the results might be. If they have not been accustomed to receiving test results and helpful interpretations in previous years, students may begin to believe that a serious response to the test is no more beneficial than a carefree one. Merely telling students that someone will make use of the results, without involving students themselves in understanding and using the results, may lead to motivational problems in subsequent years. In sum, a history of feedback and involvement, beginning in the early elementary years, is the best preparation for motivating students to do their best. Suggestions for how to report results to students are given in the Interpretive Guide for Teachers and Counselors.

Communication between school and home before testing begins can help make testing run smoothly and can help make it possible for students to do their best on the tests. The primary purposes of informing parents about the testing schedule are to solicit their support in reducing absences and tardiness, to discourage them from scheduling competing activities that may be unusually demanding of students' energies, and to encourage them to maintain a typical or routine lifestyle at home during the testing period.

Use of Practice Materials and "Test Prep"

In August 2005, Iowa Testing Programs distributed a document to all Iowa districts and schools to provide information about appropriate test use and test preparation activities. "Guidance for Developing District Policy and Rules on Test Use,Test Preparation, and Test Security for the Iowa Tests" also is available on this website. Questions and issues about use of practice materials or preparing students in test content should be addressed by referring to the relevant sections of this guidance document.

Each test in the ITBS and ITED batteries begins with one or more sample questions to give students some practice with the content and format of the test. Extensive experience with testing students indicates that no further practice is needed for most students to understand what to do. Furthermore, the sample items represent the only kind of "practice" that students in the norm group received.

There is disagreement among educators about what kind of practice is legitimate preparation for administering a standardized achievement battery. The controversy has centered on the question of what type of practice might give assistance to test takers in excess of that afforded the students in the norm group. That is, to what extent do certain pretest activities offer an advantage to test takers, causing their scores to represent higher achievement levels than they have actually attained?

The issue of legitimate practice is important because it relates directly to both the integrity and the interpretation of standardized test scores. At the heart of the matter is generalizability. The questions in each test are a sample of the many questions that could be used to test students in a particular content domain -- reading, language skills, math, etc. Of course, teachers are interested to some extent in how students in a class answer particular questions, but they are far more likely to be interested in what students' responses tell them collectively about the students' reading achievement or math skill levels. If students get advance practice on the actual test questions, or on very similar ones, the ability to generalize beyond those questions becomes restricted. In sum, the more the practice questions resemble the actual questions, the less the user can generalize about what the students are able to do or what they know.

The problem of generalizability can be illustrated easily by considering the weekly spelling test usually given to elementary-grade students. Suppose that students are given 20 words to learn to spell by the end of the week and that Jeremy gets 16 words right on the Friday test. In interpreting Jeremy's score, it would be foolish to generalize about his spelling ability because he was given the 20 words to learn in advance. However, if another set of 20 words were given to Jeremy on that Friday, words that he had not known would be tested, his score on that 20-word test would tell us something about Jeremy's spelling ability in general. As can be seen from this example, if students are given practice ahead of time on the spelling words on a standardized test, then it makes little sense to use their scores to generalize about how well those students can spell the words on a long, unseen list. Of course, the same principle applies to reading passages, math problems, or any other tasks that appear on a particular standardized test.

Commercially Developed Test Preparation Materials

There are various test preparation materials on the market that claim to ready students for standardized achievement testing. Thus far, however, there is no consistent research evidence to support the use of such materials. Most of these materials are designed to raise test scores without increasing student achievement in the long term. Such preparation actually serves to misrepresent what students know rather than to demonstrate real, substantial growth over the previous year. The authors and publisher of the Iowa tests do not endorse the use of such materials.