Testing Marathon

By: The LJHS news team

Date: April 10, 2023

Testing has just recently begun for the students of Lawrence Junior High-School, many calling it a testing marathon as the school year is finalizing with SBAC and Maps. Just last week, SBAC testing began with its English section from Tuesday April 4th and continued on April 6th. Students will need to prepare for a schedule change as testing will continue for the following weeks.

Yet, this week, we continue Sbac and start Maps testing in 2 weeks. These kinds of tests are used to monitor students' growth and help teacher’s know where their students are at, which is a huge help for students to be able to apply their skills and knowledge required by state standards. There are 2 main types of SBAC testing, a Performance task and the CAT. The CAT will adjust the difficulty of questions throughout the test based on the student's answers in order to identify a student's threshold of knowledge.

Meanwhile, MAPS testing will measure the students' knowledge in reading, language usage, and mathematics. Grades 3 through 8, including 11 will be tested in these Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments. As students and teachers are aware of these types of testing, they have mixed feelings on this. Micheal, a 7th grader and a known member from the CLTV crew at Lawrence was interviewed about his thoughts on our testing marathon. Overall, Micheal feels quite nervous about testing but finds it to be most important to the school rather than the teachers. To make sure that he scores well on Sbac, he will read the questions thoroughly and try his best to answer. To which, he’s felt that he’s done good on the Sbac so far due to him trying his very best.

As this marathon continues, students should be aware of testing dates, schedule, and material they are going to be quizzed on in order to be adequately prepared. Making sure that students come to school well rested and with the required materials, such as Chromebook chargers and headphones, will also aid in their testing experience.