Top Ways to Improve Test Scores

Top Ways to Improve Student Test Scores

TOP interventions that will improve student test scores.

1. Build academic oracy, poor language and vocabulary skills are a direct impedance to student success
2. Teach students to be proactive, ask questions, seek understanding and develop a growth mindset
3. SET SMART Goals Early and Raise your Expectations!
4. "Advertising" SELL, SELL, SELL the benefits of hard work, planning, and success derived through perseverance!
5. Study the test your students are going to take, analyze the test and look for frequency of academic vocabulary, the levels of DOK/BLOOMS test questions, and look for distractors that will trip up your students. 
6. Students need to take practice tests preferably released test to avoid test anxiety and build endurance
7. Build strong relationships with students, help them to understand their strengths and weakness using corrective feedback.

Be Proactive! Developing Intrinsic Inquiry -- Intrinsic Scholar/Dynamic Learner  Enlightened nature a learner under own direction and assisted by directions of a teacher. Always asking for deeper understanding and meaning. Intrinsically motivated to learn and curious! Loves literature, loves knowledge, loves inquiry!

Grades kill intrinsic inquiry and creativity?

We as teachers and parents need to seek an education Renaissance that creates erudite scholars not good test takers. We have lost sight of creating, exploring, developing quality educational environments that examine student outcomes and ensure all students acquire real skills not earning grades. We have students that can't read nor write, getting A's! Why? We have become too preoccupied with the perception of success without the needed hard-work and skills. What is the Real cost of this constant Extrinsic Educations Model? 50% dropout rates, 40-75% illiteracy in Title I schools, simplified curriculum, hyper inflated grading, unmotivated languid students, and student outcomes that will destroy a prosperous future.

     Test happy reforms like NCLB have created the opposite of real success. What made the US a leader in education in the past was, curiosity, creativity, and less testing ! Teachers and students are now pawns bending to the whims of the educational reformers that have no business dictating pedagogical best practices. Have we lost imagination, creativity, real teaching innovations, curiosity, "thought experiments," "travels on the ship of imagination," and the reasoning tools of the creative intrinsic mind with modern test driven school reforms? Art, creativity, theater, and music play a key role in building intrinsic desire. The arts are the foundation of the visual spatial mathematical logical intelligence that is the essential 21st century skill. We over analyze and formulate grades and rubrics for all human activity and call this research and progress, yet we lose our creativity. The dawn of humanity is the intrinsic desire to better oneself; this coincides with that dawn of geometry, math, agriculture, science, astronomy, architecture, sculpture, painting, theater, math, agriculture, and humanity. The artist, mathematician, playwright, and architect are one in the same. Leonardo da Vinci an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. What is the future....

Developing 21st Century Communication Skills Oracy --Articulate Scholar/Dynamic Communicator Superlative written and spoken communication skills at the center of learning. Digital native seeking to develop e-learning experiences and adapting to multiple learning environments, learner under own direction and assisted, augmented, and enhanced by technology.