TAKS will be administered during March, April and May. The schedule can be found here. My examples of TAKS prep will be focused on science - the content area where I do my education consulting.
What grade levels administer Science TAKS tests and what do they cover?
5th graders take a Science TAKS test that covers information and skills they learned in 2nd-5th grade.
8th grade students take a Science TAKS test covering 6th-8th grade material.
10th graders take a Science TAKS test that covers the Nature of Science (mostly interpreting experimental results, but also lab safety and lab equipment), Introduction to Physics and Chemistry (IPC - mostly not taught anymore) and Biology.
11th graders take a Science Exit TAKS that covers the mostly the same topics as the 10th grade test. Texas high school students cannot graduate without passing their science, social studies, English and math Exit TAKS. Students can retake their Exit TAKS up to five times to try and pass (and, I have seen students have to take the Science Exit five times). Retakes for the Science Exit are in October, March, April and during the summer. I've worked with students who passed all their high school course work but have failed one or more Exits, and have returned to high school just to participate in TAKS prep classes, so they can get their diploma.Some things are obvious:
Science TAKS accountability falls only on teachers with 5th, 8th, 10th and 11th grade students.
These teachers are being told right now, "you are responsible for your students passing TAKS." If you are a fifth grade teacher, it's often the case that science isn't really taught in 2nd-4th grades, because of the TAK pressure in the areas of reading, writing, and math, so you've been spending the entire year backtracking on skills and knowledge from past grade levels. You are quite possibly in panic mode right now, after looking at data which shows low scores on fall benchmarks.
Science is definitely taught in 6th and 7th grade, but there's no guarantee a teacher's 8th grade students got quality science instruction in the previous grades, or that the students retained prior knowledge. You've got no option but to find time to review the 6th and 7th grade material.
High school has different scenarios. 10th and 11th grade TAKS takers are sprinkled throughout a variety of science courses. It might be the case that MOST 9th graders take Biology, and most 10th graders take Chemistry and most 11th graders take Physics - but some students are in IPC as a freshman or sophomore because of low math or science grades. Some students have failed classes, and while they should be in 11th grade if they are taking physics, they might actually be classified as a sophomore. To add to confusion, administrators are in the process of reclassifying high school students right now, based on if they passed enough classes in the fall to move up a grade level.
So, how are schools prepping students for TAKS?
First, schools who are on top of things are carefully examining student data to determine which students need extra help to pass TAKS. Generally, you rank your students in order from most likely to pass, to least likely, by looking at past TAKS scores, current year benchmark scores, grades and the teacher's professional judgement. Whether anyone wants to say it out loud or not, there are "bubble kids" who are in the middle - those who are expected to barely pass or barely fail who need intervention to ensure they pass. When I refer to benchmark scores, this usually means scores from a practice TAKS - one of the previously given TAKS tests that is provided by TEA. Schools typically give one benchmark in the Fall and one or two in the Spring.
Whole class focus on TAKS
Right now, and hopefully all year long, teachers are hyper aware of what material is on TAKS and what is not, so as they march through their schedule, they always do some sort of TAKS focus - more instruction on material covered on TAKS and less on other content, as well as practice TAKS questions.
After school and Saturday tutorials
These are targeted at students who are projected to fail or barely pass. The trick is to get kids to these tutorials. Food is usually used as an incentive. I asked one elementary principal who is having greater success this year getting students to tutorials than last year, how he made that happen. His answer: Happy Meals. You can make these tutorials "required", but you can't really make students attend. Enlisting parental help is a must. Motivating students by showing them what TAKS objectives they need help on, is also important.
Rescheduling students to TAKS prep classes
This is typical in higher performing schools where there are fewer students in danger of failing TAKS. Some teachers will be reassigned in the spring to teach TAKS prep classes for those students whose benchmarks scores are low and grades are poor.
TAKS packets
Oh, the joys of sending students home with TAKS prep materials and crossing your fingers they will complete them. This works a little better for higher performing students, but it takes a lot of encouraging, monitoring and reviewing to get results from this strategy.
Special TAKS prep during the school week - high schools
High schools are in a bind on TAKS. You've got a kid sitting in a Chemistry class, but they have to do well on the Biology and Physics portions of TAKS. How do you prep them? Many campuses have something like an every Friday TAKS day where Bio, Chem and Physics teachers rotate into all the science classes on a schedule, teaching very focused TAKS lessons to all students. Some high schools implement a post-spring break through TAKS test day schedule where each teacher reviews all subject areas. Yes, clearly, these strategies prevent teachers from fully covering their own curriculum during much of the Spring semester, but what are you supposed to do when your school accountability rating depends on good science scores, not to mention teacher evaluations depending on the same thing?
If this sounds complicated, it is. These sorts of TAKS prep program can fail at several points - if the teacher is absent, if the student is absent or refuses to participate in tutorials, and if they lessons are not truly aligned with TAKS. New teachers, and schools without common planning periods or effective leadership structures, have a difficult time with aligning instruction to TAKS.
You can probably guess where I have the most problem with basing teacher evaluations on TAKS. How can one science teacher be truly accountable for all the science teaching and learning that should have happened in the other classes, and the other grade levels, that TAKS covers? It would be a little better if schools could tie each student back to every science teacher they ever had - and reward or punish those teachers for the job they did preparing that student for science TAKS in a later grade or other subject - but I don't find schools' data systems to be anywhere near sophisticated enough to accomplish that.
When does this ever end? With end of course exams, which will be required of freshmen entering high school in 2011. And, by all accounts, that will create a whole new set of challenges.
If you have your own TAKS prep scenarios or stories, please leave them in the comments.
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