Balancing Time for Tests FREEBIE!

This year I love my class of serious learners!  They have been motivated to do their best and really show what they know for their grades.  However, there were still problems to discuss during one of our leadership meetings about testing.  I created this visual to go along with our talk . . .

Before using the scale, I put it together.  I cut off the scale from the bottom of our visual (I would probably leave the white on either end of the testing/learning banner to make it easier to tug back-and-forth next time though!). 

Then I cut the slits for the scale to slide through.  

And now, back to the concerns . . . 

 

We show progress at our school by having the students take pretests and comparing them to the posttests.  One of the concerns I noticed were the students taking waaaayyyyyy too long on the pretest because they wanted to do well, even if they hadn't learned the material before.  The scale looked like this when we had our pretest talk. . .

Here it is easier to see that if we only have a certain amount of time at school, and we take a reaaalllyyyy long time on pretests, we don't leave as much time as we may need for learning.

The next example was to encourage the kids not to rush through the pretest either.  Or, I also had some students so confident on the posttests that they would race to be the first ones done instead of double checking for silly mistakes.  The scale looked like this . . .

If they rushed through the pretest, they may not be truly showing what they already know and would be bored with the extra learning instead of just proving they needed a quick review.  Also, if they rushed through their posttest, they would have to spend more time being pulled back for Conceptual Refinement (what our school uses as Response to Intervention (RTI) or reteaching time) even if they knew it but didn't double check their work.

In the end, the kids used the habit of putting 1st things 1st to describe how they should balance their pretest, learning, and posttest time so they wouldn't waste any of their class time. :)

 Thanks for checking it out!  Download the scale for free HERE.  Have a great week!