Review Strategies for EOC, Benchmark, and AP Exams [Episode 72]

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You’re listening to episode number 72 of the secondary science simplified podcast. If you’ve been around my corner of the internet for even just a little bit, then you most likely know how much I absolutely hate reviewing. It doesn’t matter if it’s for the AP Bio exam, or if it’s just for a unit test. Or if it’s for the state standardized, and of course exam that we have where I live, no matter what it is, I just truly dread review days, they are not my favorite whatsoever. So I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make them as pain free as possible for me, while still being helpful for my students, because I do know the importance of review. And I know that reviewing is a part of this job, and a part of me serving my students, and helping them be set up for success, especially for those higher stakes exams, like AP exams like EEOC and other benchmark tests, though today, I’m going to share with you four tips that I have gathered over the years for how to best review for those end of year tests and exams. Specifically, if you have some standardized ones, whether those are called benchmarks, ie OCS, Star exams, AP, you name it, these tips will apply. Ready to hear more. Let’s dive in.

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This is secondary science simplified a podcast for secondary science teachers who want to engage their students and simplify their lives. I’m Rebecca joiner from it’s not rocket science. As a high school science teacher turned curriculum writer, I am passionate about helping other science teachers love their jobs, serve their students, and do it all in only 40 hours a week. Are you ready to rock the time you spend in your classroom and actually have a life outside of it? You are in the right place teacher friend, let’s get to today’s episode.

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Here is the first thing I want to tell you from my years of action research trying to figure out how to make reviewing as pain free as possible because I truly dread it so much. I approach this differently. When I’ve been on a team of teachers like we’re all teaching biology, we’re all teaching anatomy or something like that, versus when I’ve been a lone ranger or and I’m like the only one teaching what I teach, maybe you’re the entire department if you’re in a really tiny school. So my first two tips are going to apply if you are on a team, and then my last two are going to apply no matter what whether you’re on a team or doing your own thing, running the ship of your department. Okay, so first, if you have a team, please, please take advantage of it, and divide and conquer the creation of review materials. Okay, so I had my first teaching job, I was in a large public school at different times, I was between being one of four to six biology teachers, because different semesters were the semester blocks, you had different classes, and sometimes more of us were teaching it sometimes less. So let’s just say on average, there were five of us teaching biology at once. And in my state biology, one is an EOC course it has an end of course exam to it, that the state gives. And it really has a huge factor in terms of if students will pass biology one or not. Our state has it for algebra one English one, biology one and then US history. And for my conversations with y’all, it sounds like it’s very similar in most states, that you have something like that. And it tends to be biology. That’s the kicker there. But I know other states, you know, you may call them benchmarks, whatever, maybe you teach an AP class. So there’s all sorts of different names. But when you’re doing this, your review can be so long, like especially for like when it’s a standardized test, like an AP exam, you’re building up to you, you’re probably building in one to two weeks of review, that’s a lot of days. And so if you have multiple people teaching your subject, so that you’re not just having to constantly churn out unique and creative and effective review materials, divide and conquer. This is what we did on my team of biology teachers at that first school, as we were preparing for the biology one exam. Yes, we all got our own scores for how what our personal pass rate and our average were, but we also were looked at as a department, how did our school do on biology one which reflected our department, our little sub department of biology teachers, so we all want to do well. And so what we would do is we’d split it up, and we would each take a core content area, a core unit or two, and we would create the review materials for that unit. So you know, one teacher covered evolution, another covered ecology, someone did all genetics and heredity, another person did cells and like biochem. You know, we divided it that way, so that it majorly lifted the burden and then we just share those resources with each other. Was it like Did everyone make things the way I do know the style is different and that kind of thing. But you can tell your students like, Okay, we’re gonna do this evolution review, Mr. E is the one who made it. You know, he shared this with us because it’s his expertise. And I think one thing that we found really helpful with that is a lot of us explained things different ways. And so to have everyone contributing different content area, and then we’re all using the same stuff, it was really, really great for my students to see review materials on biochemistry that another teacher made, so that they could he see how it could be learned a different way, or one of our teachers was a lot more technical, another was a lot more creative. The creative teacher made smartboard resources for us to use on our smart boards, where we are dragging things and drawing. And it was very cool to really partner with my team, and divide the work up that way. Because over, you know, 10 Review days, when there’s five of us, were each only having to come up with two days where the review materials, it really helped to that burden. So if you teach on a team, I recommend dividing and conquering the creation of the review materials. The second thing I want to encourage you to do, if you are on a team, is if you’re able to swing it, let students rotate between different classrooms. Okay, so this doesn’t always work. But we had a couple of class periods were like, first period, four of us were teaching biology one at the same time, you know, second period, we might only have two of us teaching it because we all had other preps too. But what we would do is, let’s say that first period, we would take different days, or we teach take different groups. So not only was I responsible, you know, for all of the heredity review materials, then I was the one who taught it to everyone, students, they rotate it into my classroom, mine went to other classrooms. And this was so so good, y’all, I think it was so great for them to not only see different review materials made by other teachers, but to hear from different teachers on different content area, I can’t express how much it was so funny how like, I would have students in my class, I would explain something the way I’ve always explained it, you know, I’ve said it this way, 500 times my students, that their teacher never said it that way. And they heard it in there, like it finally makes sense. And vice versa, that was happening with my students and other people’s classrooms. So I really encourage you, if that’s possible, and you can do that. I recommend it. Now, worst case scenario, if that’s not possible, just schedule wise, logistic wise. But another thing we did was the two weeks before the EOC, four days a week, so Monday through Thursday, because no one wants to do Friday’s one of us would like stay after every day. And we were in charge of review for that day. So it was like for two weeks, basically, every day after school for one hour, one of us was running a review session, and you only had to run one or two of them, depending on how many of us were teaching biology at that time. And it was great, because your students are getting so much extra support. And they’re again, having an opportunity to learn from another teacher. So even if you can’t make that work in the classroom, using that outside space is great. And then you’re not running review sessions every single day, you know, for two weeks, you’re only having to show up one or two of those times. And you know, your coworkers are covering it the other times. So I definitely recommend doing that as well, if you’re able to swing it. Now I know some of you are listening, and you’re like, I wish I was on a team. Like I remember teaching AP Biology and I so wish I wasn’t the only one teaching it like, Is anyone else teaching AP Bio, it would have been so nice to be able to partner with someone in my building on that content and on those review materials. But again, I know that’s not always possible. So my next two tips apply whether you’re on a team or not. And the third tip I’m going to share is you need to do as many practice problems as possible. And ideally, practice problems that are written exactly like the test questions. Because here’s the deal, you may be a better test writer than the creator of your state use he exam. Okay, you may write better questions, but it doesn’t matter because you’re not writing the EOC exam. And I will tell you, this was hard for me. I took several courses in my master’s program about how to write tests. So this is something I’m really passionate about making really good, fair, well written test questions. And so it was hard for me to see some of the released EOC practice problems from my state and be like, some of these questions are so bad, like they’re not worded well, like they’re inadvertently being tricky, when they shouldn’t be tricky. And you know what, though, it doesn’t matter because my students need to learn how to take those kinds of tests and how to do those kinds of practice problems. So I recommend bringing in as many of those as you possibly can, especially if you teach AP. The way that AP and College Board writes the questions is so different from how I wrote my questions. I genuinely feel like they try to make it as hard as possible. I’ve said this I don’t know if I’ve said this on the podcast, but I’ve said it on Instagram 1000 times. I swear y’all the AP biology exam, is a reading comprehension test. It’s not like a biology content or even skills based test. I really feel like if you are a really good reader, you can look at the data they provide and answer the questions. It really gives me like a CT science vibes not Do you actually know AP Biology To understand it, energy, but that’s a tangent, I could go on another day. So I think it’s so important, especially for something like that, that your students are seeing the way that questions are worded. They’re seeing the way things are distracting. One thing I told all my AP Biology students was, listen, they’re just gonna throw out like random information in the questions to try to throw you off. Like they’re going to start sharing this data with you about some experiment, you know about something that happened in the cell, and your initial reaction is going to be, oh, my gosh, Miss Joyner never taught me this. But it doesn’t matter. Because rarely is the question about the actual content, it’s about your ability to interpret the data they give you or you know, make a graph from this and analyze it. And so they throw in these distractors. So I really actually, with AP Biology, I wrote all of my unit tests from old test questions and fr Q’s. And my students did not do well on them, because they’re so hard. So I definitely had to curve those. But I think it really helped them because I will say none of my students had a problem on the AP Bio exam with time, they all did great with time because they were used to I had basically taken the length of the AP Bio exam and the number of questions and like, done a little calculation and figured out how many multiple choice grid ins and fr Q’s I should be able to answer in my 50 minute class period for our test. And I narrowed it down to that, I think it was like between 20 and 25, multiple choice, that’d be 20. If I had any grid questions, and then like, anywhere from like, one to three fr Q’s, depending on how long they are, because you know, some of them are like nine to 10 pointers, others are like three to four pointers. So I think giving them the literal types of problems they’re going to see is so helpful, because they get used to the language. They’ve used the organization, they get used to the weird way things are phrased, we can look at the problem and be like, okay, yeah, this doesn’t make sense. There isn’t one gradients are. But let’s choose the best answer from these four options. I saw that, especially with our biology EOC. Again, like, didn’t feel like it was really well written. But that’s not the point, we got to teach the kids how to take the test. And I hate even saying that, because it leans to teach to the test, which I hate, and I don’t want to do. But we have to be real here. A lot of you have these standardized tests, and they affect your job performance, you know, how your students do on the so I get the pressure of that. And that’s where I say, we need to expose them to how these things are worded. So we can help them you know, learn how to think through and problem solve through these different test questions. So that’s my third tip, as many practice problems that you can that are written, like the test questions, they will see, you know, so this is where you can get a little crafty in terms of like, finding and scavenging as big of a bank as possible of you, as you can have old questions. So like AP is kind of nice, because you know, they’ll release old fr Q’s, but then they also put out practice exams every year. So when they did the rewrite, and maybe 2012, or something like that, I would always pull questions from the 2012. Practice tests on and at least use those for EOC or your state test, see if they’ve they have practice exams that they released every year that you can compile from past years and use those to try to get those and just create a bank on your computer that you use it year after year for that and then to do the practice problems, so it doesn’t get boring, especially if it’s like a multiple choice based tests. Those get so boring, you’re not going to give them like 100 test questions do. I recommend a couple of things. One use whiteboards. If you don’t have a class set of little mini whiteboards, and markers and erasers you need to get them you can Amazon right now. See these little sets they make? It’s so nice. Your students will love you and write on them. And then you can they can, you can give them a countdown, you say three to one, they show you their answer. And then you reveal the answer. And they can keep track of how many points they have. It just feels way more fun to do it that way, as opposed to doing it on paper. Another way you can do it is you can do teams verse on their own, you know, break them up in partners with a partner somedays groups of three or four other days, and then some days they’re gonna work on their own. If you don’t have whiteboards, another thing you can do is you can just make simple pieces of paper and put a and b on one piece, and then C and D on another and then each kid has to, and you’ll have them just hold in the air their letter. And the nice thing about having cards like this, the ABCD cards is you can just go outside and then do review questions. Like you’re going to read out a multiple choice question and they have to lift up their letter type thing. Another thing to do with the letters is if you’re in your classroom, put in a A B, a C and a D in each corner of your classroom, which this works best if you have a rectangular room, but give them each each corner a letter and then put a question up projected on your whiteboard, then have students physically move to the corner that they think is the correct answer. I love this because it gets them out of their seat but allows you to do something without having to take them outside. If that’s something that’s hard to do at your school. The only bummer is of course, students will start just like if you have a class of 30 There’s gonna start like following who they deem as the smartest kid in the class. But if your questions are written tricky, like mine tend to be from my state. It still gives you some pretty good challenge level there because it’s not always Gonna be a clear cut and dry right answer for them. So I love getting them out of their seats for that too. If you have multiple sections of your class, like, you teach three different biology ones, having some sort of competition between your classes, and keeping a tally on the board is a game changer. And there can be a lot of different ways that they can earn points. It can be something where it is like knowledge base and how the class does on some sort of practice tests you get them, it could be something where they earn points based on behavior and how well they commit to review, it can be they get points for every time someone from their class goes to one of the afternoon review sessions. And you can have a really good reward for them, like you’re gonna make them breakfast one day after the exam if you haven’t in the morning, or you’re going to order in pizza for them one day, if it’s an afternoon class, or there’s so many making little goodie bags, but I think making it a competition between classes. And you can do even like a game board where it’s like you get five points. If y’all do this, five points for this, I think that can make it really fun and help jazz up review days. That can be boring with a lot of practice problems. And then the last thing I’ll say about the practice problems is for exams where you have fr Q’s like on an AP exam, you know, that’s a free response question or an open response question. They need to be doing these all year long. I have a couple AP Bio teacher friends that do fr Q Fridays, so literally, every Friday, they spent half of class doing one fr Q, and then going over it, basically. But I really recommend doing these all year. But no matter when you’re you do it, whether it’s all year, every Friday, or just at the end, when you’re reviewing, they need to see the rubrics for how these are graded. And I love like pull up on your projector pull up the FR Q pulled the rubric, if you have samples of like, okay, here’s someone who answered this question and got nine of the points. Here’s someone who got seven, here’s someone who got five, let them see, I think it’s so helpful for them to see legit feedback. And what actually gets points and what doesn’t, I think this is really helpful too, because like, they need to label the sections, that’s really helpful. I don’t think it’s required that they label sections on AP Bio, but if you don’t label them, and then something bleeds into the other part, the grader may not know what part you’re answering. So just little things like that. I think if they can see them on AP, that’s really important. I also think having them do fr Q’s anonymously, and then like mixing them up around the class. And then giving each student a rubric and having them grade each other’s or better yet is my favorite if you have two sections of AP, give each class and fr Q and then swap them. So like period two grades, period forwards, period for grades, period twos and they give each other feedback if they don’t know who did who’s you can assign each student like a number. But I think that’s really good because then they’re not really looking at people’s in the classrooms, it’s harder to discern who didn’t lead. But it just such a good way for them to see, I think they learned so much from seeing what other people are doing too. So like I said, First tip, divide and conquer if you’re on a team. Second tip, even like rotate your students and let them learn from each teacher on your team. If you’re able, third tip, do as many practice problems as possible, especially ones that mimic the way that test questions are going to be written. And then last but not least, if you don’t have a team, or even if you do, and you want to make this, I highly recommend making review stations. So I love using stations in my high school science classes, I think they helped make review a lot more active, it makes it way more about them and way less about me, they get students out of their seats, it helps again, it’s more student centric. Rather than teacher centric. It’s a fun opportunity to to get some one on one time with students. And I’ll explain how I do that. And I also just think they’re fun. And again, I just think it takes the pressure off of me being at front, like doing all this review and almost like entertainment to keep them engaged during review days. I just think it’s they’re so exhausting. I’m feeling tired just thinking about review days. So I really recommend doing review stations. And so I’m going to kind of explain to you the way that I like to make review stations so that you can make some quickly for your students. And the nice thing about this as you can make these as long or short as you want, you can make these short enough that they could do a whole set in one day, or you could stretch this out where it’s going to take several days. Okay, so if I was going to tell you how to make review stations, here is how I would tell you to do it. First review station number one should be some sort of make a cheat sheet station. So I would set up a giant sticky note if you know what I’m talking about, like those big yellow pads that are like sticky on top and like it’s literally just like a giant post it I would set that up and set up some markers and then write a topic at the top of a sticky note. And then for put a bunch of different topics like all around that wall that maybe you’re on. Okay, so thinking about like my genetics unit, let’s say I was going to do these review stations specifically on genetics. I would have three sticky notes, one that says DNA structure and replication, one that says protein synthesis and one that says meiosis because those are the three main concepts I covered my genetics unit. at that station. Students are going to treat each giant sticky No as like a cheat sheet, and what they’re going to do is they’re going to write down what did they think is the most important thing to know, under each topic, then in a class, what you can do is you can go up to these, it’s like these massive cheat sheets that they’ve compiled as a cloth, they each kind of put one or two things on it, you can go through and highlight with big markers and stuff, okay, what are the most important things they wrote down, maybe cross out or de emphasize anything they added, it’s not that important. Correct, anything that might be incorrect, and then add anything big that’s missing. And then on the way out, students can take pictures of these A study from, or you can give them a whole nother day, where they get to write all the information out to have it as their own, you know, study sheets, I love these because like, literally, you have to do barely any prep, other than having those giant sticky notes. But it’s so helpful for your students. And it’s something that they can kind of walk away with later and really study from, and if you don’t want to buy those giant sticky notes, because I know they can get expensive, you can just use your whiteboard and kind of like draw a grid on it and divide up your whiteboard that way, I just know, you may not have that much whiteboard space. So the stickies are nice, too, especially you can send students out in the hall. And then this entire review station can be in the hallway, and you just let them walk down the hall. And they add that, you know, let’s say you’re doing your entire first semester, you’re going to review one day, you can literally have like 15 to 20 of these giant stickies out in the hall, and have students from all your class periods contribute to them. And then the next day, you get to look over them. So I just think it’s a really great station. The second review station, I always like to have is some sort of practice question station. So like I said, having these is so important. Don’t reinvent the wheel, you can just pull up literally what y’all can do is like pull up old Quiz and test questions even. And put them all on one sheet and like a different font. I swear, they will not necessarily remember that they’ve seen this before, or just go on Google. It’s like there’s so many tests and answer keys and stuff online. Because again, you’re not giving this as like an end of unit assessment. This is just for practice. And then of course, see if there’s anything provided for you as review materials for your benchmark or standardized tests. Because again, those will make the best questions. But you can do that. And you could have them record their answers on a piece of paper, and then you can go over them at the end of class, you can have an answer key where they check their answers before they rotate it however you want to do that. But I want you to have a practice questions station. The third station I want you to have is some sort of vocabulary review station. And so I love to have one station that’s entirely dedicated to this. And again, it’s one that’s like no prep, all you need to do is print out a list of key vocabulary terms for them. And then one other pages that’ll have like simple instructions. And so two different ways I like to do this, I like to either ask my students to make a concept map or ask them to make a flip chart, the content map is a little bit more of an advanced option, especially if you have a lot of vocabulary words, that basically students will take your list of terms. And they’re going to draw a concept map that shows what the words mean, and how the terms are related to each other. And they have to make two versions, they got to make a blank one, and then a filled in one that would serve as like an answer key. And then if they have extra time, they can swap these with a friend or you can collect all these and then use these reviewed a number two as your practice. So they’re going to do each other’s it’s a great way to if you’re an NGSS school to get them to practice developing and using models. So I love doing the concept maps, a less advanced option that’s still very helpful is to do a flip chart. And so basically, you’ll take a piece of computer paper, and you’re gonna fold it hamburger style, but make the edges kiss. Okay, so then once it’s folded, it’s gonna look like you have two doors. And then they can cut tabs in the paper. So they take their scissors and cut from the edge to the crease. And they can cut as many as they need on each side. And then on the outside of each flap, they write the term and then if they open the flap underneath it, it would have the vocabulary term, or excuse me the definition. And I like this because it’s really tactile. And students leave your classroom literally with a helpful studying tool. And I also like it because it’s way easier for them to keep up with them like a Ziploc bag of flashcards because it’s all just on one piece. So I love to have that. So first review station, again, make a cheat sheet station with your giant post it notes. Second will be a practice question station. Third is some sort of vocabulary review station. Fourth is my favorite. And this is the ask the teacher station. And I like to build this in again, no prep whatsoever. You’re not bringing anything to the table here. But you’re just gonna have a station where you’re sitting with a group of students, and you’re just going to be with them and answer their questions. You can ask them what they want you to reteach on, where are they falling short, you can if you feel your students really shy, you can pull out old tests here and have them look at their tests and review the questions that they got wrong and go over them with them there. It just gives you some smaller group time that I think is really special about that face to face time with them. And it’s nice because you can do this because the other stations are so independent, like your other students can be doing those other stations while you’re in this group and I really liked that. The last if you have a bigger class, you might need a fifth station just because you don’t want to only divide them up in to four But having a physician be just some sort of review game. And this can be anything that you have, I really like to do like a taboo inspired vocabulary review game, I have made these for all my units in biology, anatomy, physical science and the chemistry units that I’ve finished. So far as I’m finishing them, I’m writing those two. And these are nice, because they can just pick up these sets of cards, and they can play with each other. And if they can just play while they’re waiting to rotate, it’s a nice little brain break from some of the other stations that are a little bit more hands on. So those would be the five review stations that I love. And again, you could really spread this out over several days and make this the whole thing but they don’t really require that much prep, which is why I love them. And I love being able to throw them together last minute. Now, if you’re like how does this look practically on an actual class period day, let’s say you have a 50 minute class period, I would have my first five minutes be some sort of bell ringer, which because y’all know, I love a good primetime, which is what I call bell ringers, because I think they’re the most important. first five minutes of your class is so important. So I would do the bell ringer, then I would follow that with just an overview of each station and what’s expected of them. And then I would draw sticks and divide them into groups, that’s about another five minutes. And then I would send them off to each station, tell each group where to start, give them a number to start at. And instead of timer. So based on how long your class period is, if it’s a 50 minute class period, they’re only gonna get five to eight minutes per station. But you’ll set some sort of timer when it goes off, everyone rotates. So station one goes a to two goes to three, three goes to four, etc. And then save yourself 10 to 15 minutes at the end of class to go over stations if you need to. But if you have extra time, go over them the next day and take your time with it. But I think this is my favorite like really practical way to review students. I mean, of course, I love if you can do the team method. But again, I know that’s not possible for everyone. So if you need help with review, review stations, to me are where it’s at. And I think setting them up in this way is very pain free. And so I encourage you to try it. And if you do, let me know, I cannot tell you how much it encourages me to hear from y’all on my DMs my inbox when you listen to a podcast, and you try it out. So let me know if you try this out. I hope it’s given you some ideas and equipped you as you prepare for your benchmark and your EOC and your AP exams this May and as the school year wraps up, and reach out to me if you have any follow up questions or if you have another strategy you use that’s gone really well. I would love to hear about it. And I can share this over on my Instagram Stories for everyone who hangs around over there. As always, you can find today’s show notes at isn’t rocket science classroom.com/episode 72. And cool thing I don’t know if you knew this a few weeks ago, someone reached out to me and asked if I had transcripts for my podcast episodes, for those that are hard of hearing. And at the time I didn’t. But since she asked, I now have that available. So I can’t remember, I think it might be episode 66 on there’s a transcript now for every podcast episodes, if you go to the show notes, you can go there and there’s kind of like a little drop down menu, you click and the transcript will be there. It’s very raw. It’s just literally transcribing exactly what I say. And since you know, I have my own little way of speaking sometimes it doesn’t translate me perfectly or put the perfect grammar in there. But hey, it’s helpful. And I hope that’s a good resource for y’all. And if you are enjoying listening to the podcast, I would love it if you rated and left a review and especially if you shared it with a friend. I don’t think you all realize how helpful and encouraging is when you share about isn’t rocket science and the secondary science simplified Podcast with your teacher friends. Like it’s so encouraging to me when I hear someone say oh my coworkers that I had to check you out or my teacher friend in a different state send me your podcast and I just it nothing brings me more joy. So please, please, please share with a friend. So they can be a part of our little community over here too. And also last thing stay tuned because next week is Teacher Appreciation Week, and I have a special little themed episode that I think you’re gonna laugh out a lot and really enjoy. So I’ll see you next week.

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All right, teacher friends. That wraps up today’s episode. If you’re looking for an easy way to start simplifying your life as a secondary science teacher, head to It’s not rocket science classroom.com/challenge to grab your classroom reset challenge. And guess what? It’s totally free. Thanks so much for tuning in and I’ll see you here next week. Until then I’ll be really free teacher friend.