Today is Science Exit TAKS Day. Could You Pass and Graduate?

My education consulting this school year has been preparing teachers and students for today, when the Science Exit TAKS is administered to all Texas 11th graders. This is one of the four tests students have to pass in order to graduate from a Texas high school, the others being Math, Social Studies and English Language Arts Exit TAKS.

In addition, today a Science TAKS is being administered to all Texas 5th, 8th, and 10th graders, but their scores do not affect their promoting to the next grade. These scores do count towards the TEA school accountability rankings (Exemplary, Recognized, Acceptable, etc.), but not towards AYP - the federal Annual Yearly Progress accountability system.

There are 55 questions on the Science Exit TAKS, and students have to pass 30 (plus or minus - the cut score varies each year depending on the difficulty of the test.) In April 2009, 262,301 Texas juniors took the test, and 85% passed.

The Science Exit TAKS covers five area of science - the Nature of Science (labs, data, etc.), Organization of Living Systems (Biology), Interdependence of Organisms and the Environment (Biology), Structures and Properties of Matter (Chemistry), and Motion, Forces, and Energy (Phyiscs). Students typically took Biology in 9th grade, Chemistry in 10th grade and they are sitting in a Physics class as 11th grade Exit takers. You can see a breakdown of how last year's 11th graders scored on each part of the test here.

To thoroughly prepare students for this high stakes test, we implement many strategy layers, including:

1. Ensuring the taught curriculum is aligned to TAKS.
2. Ensuring assessments include TAKS-like questions.
3. Having students practice many problems from released TAKS tests. (The TEA website is my friend as well as this from Dallas County Schools and teacher created websites such as this.)
4. After school tutorials.
5. Saturday tutorials.
6. Direct TAKS instruction during the regular school day by Bio and Chem teachers rotating into 11th grade Physics classes on a once week basis during the spring semester.
7. Rallies and incentives.
8. Bringing in outside consultants and/or special TAKS prep programs (computerized, for example.)

Here are your seven practice Science Exit TAKS questions. Click on them to make them larger. The answers are in the comments. Please let me know how you did!