State Testing Motivators

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Permalink Reply by Katy Scott on April 4, 2011 at 10:00am

With state testing in elementary schools, I've found success focusing on good test-taking strategies and behaviors, rather than on performance.

 

At my school, starting in August, we'd start discussing good testing strategies -- crossing out wrong answers, doing all the work in the booklet, checking answers, etc. Every time we took a practice (or real) standardized test, I'd walk around the classroom and, when students exhibited those behaviors, I'd place an eraser or small prize on their desk. After the testing, I'd single out a few students for using good behaviors and I'd specify what they did well. "Julio, I noticed you wrote a lot in your booklet today. Can you tell us why you did that?... Great work, Julio!" "Paulina, you were the last person to finish your test because you spent so much time checking all your work. Did you find any mistakes when you checked your work? ... Wow! That was really smart, Paulina."

 

We'd also treat testing week almost as a spirit week, with students bringing 'brain food' on one day, wearing 'smart socks' on another, etc. One teacher even decorated her classroom as a cafe, so students could relax and feel pampered during breakfast before the testing began.

 

With middle school students, in addition to encouraging good test-taking strategies like those detailed above, we were able to motivate them with competition. This might not work in every school, but our students lived in low-income areas and saw themselves in a certain light. We would pump them up by telling them that other people didn't expect them to do well, and they needed to prove those haters wrong. We even singled out a specific high-income school that was often highlighted in the news as a model 'good school.' We had chants and cheers about how were going to crush that school in testing, to prove that our school was better. (For the record, we did crush them.)

 

Katy Scott

Stretch Your Digital Dollar

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Permalink Reply by Nicole Lade on April 4, 2011 at 10:17am

Thank you for your input! Our students here are VERY competitive and have a HUGE rival just 8 miles down the road, so I was trying to think of something to include that- I got some good ideas from your response, so THANK YOU :)

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