The best way to prepare your students for a standardized test is to teach them the content in such a way that they will have a passion and interest for the material. STILL, students don’t need to go into a standardized test administration without some practice dealing with these tests. Ugh, I hate those things. Since, unfortunately, they are a necessary evil, it is important to help you students go into the test administration feeling as confident and comfortable as possible. It is very important to expose students to the types of questions that they will encounter for two reasons.
1- You can model good test-taking skills for your students. (Show a question and then explain how you would go about answering it as if you weren’t sure of the answer.)
2- It will help reduce test anxiety. (De-mystify the whole idea of a top-secret, scary test for your students. Show them questions that were used in the past. Allow them to see the layout and wording of questions.)
What’s the best way to do this? Several states have released older versions of their end of course tests. Look at these, take questions from them, and put them on a powerpoint slide. Discuss one question a day starting a week or two before the test. You don’t have to cover them all, but you do need to cover the basic types of questions (reading a passage questions, map questions, political cartoon questions, graph questions, etc.).
If you are really ambitious, you can go through each of these tests and categorize the questions based on topic. (This might be a good summer or holiday project.) You can then use them when you cover each unit or use them as test questions for your own classroom tests.
When covering these questions, I always tell my students one thing: “You will not know everything on this test, so don’t freak out if you come across a question you don’t know the answer to. Try your best, that’s all I ask.”
Texas Released End of Course Test and Answer Key (scroll down for 7 different tests)
Georgia Released End of Course Test and Answer Key (separate)