Helping Teachers Navigate State Assessments Beyond “Teaching to the Test”

April 25, 2025

By Andrew Bell

​​Every spring, millions of students take state summative assessments to evaluate what they’ve learned by the end of the school year. When results come back, teachers are sometimes surprised when their students do not receive higher scores on state summative assessments and wonder how they can better prepare students for the next round of assessments.

Summative assessments play an important role in accountability and as a measure of student learning. Because of the role that state assessments play in accountability, teachers can benefit from learning about their state assessments and how they are designed to measure student learning.

In this blog post, I discuss the purpose of summative assessments and how professional development for teachers on these assessments can support student learning.

What State Summative Assessments Are Designed to Do

A key component of effective teaching is ensuring that classroom instruction and curricula meet grade level expectations. This requires aligning instruction with the depth and breadth of the academic content standards. Standards-aligned instruction guides teachers in the planning, implementing, and assessing of student learning. It also helps students transfer and build on knowledge and skills from one grade level to the next as they progress through their academic careers.

One way that states evaluate the effectiveness of instruction and implementation of the state standards is through their summative assessments. These assessments provide a snapshot of whether students have acquired the knowledge and skills reflected in the standards. While the state summative assessments cannot cover all of the content included in the state standards, they do address key content that reflects the expectations for student learning.

Although the assessment results are typically not reported until after the close of the school year, they can still provide valuable information retrospectively, such as the following:

• Were there areas where all students did well?
• Was there content that all students found challenging?
• Was there content that some of the students found challenging?
• What are the characteristics of those students, and what does that say about instruction?
• If scores are reported for constructed response items, how are students performing on these items?

These findings can inform whether the strategies used to teach the content standards need to be evaluated.

Rethinking Common Test Preparation Practices

Lacking ​a deep understanding of summative assessments​ often leads teachers to engage in ineffective test preparation activities. Teachers may focus on teaching test-taking strategies such as

• selecting answer choices that are the shortest or longest,
• choosing answer choices that have words students do not recognize​,​
• selecting “C” when students do not know the answer​, and​​ ​
• engaging their students in taking released or practice tests.

Whereas some preparation activities can help students become familiar with the item types and how to respond, particularly for assessments taken online that involve a variety of question types, too much time spent on test preparation takes precious time away from instruction on the standards, which is the best way to prepare students for the summative assessment.

A more effective approach to preparing for state assessments is to learn what they are about and what information they cover. Generally, state education agencies (SEAs) post information about their assessments on their websites. Another way to learn about the state assessments is to participate on state assessment committees.

SEAs typically invite teachers to sign up for various committees for assessed subjects that meet throughout the school year or during the summer. These meetings include passage or stimulus committees, item-writing committees, item-review committees, data-review committees, bias and sensitivity committees, and, finally, standard-setting committees.

SEAs frequently pay stipends and/or offer professional development credits to entice teachers to participate. Unfortunately, committees typically have limited spaces for applicants, so getting on them is not easy.

Additional Opportunities for Teachers to Learn About Assessments

WestEd offers a wide range of professional development services to help teachers learn about state assessments.​ ​​ ​

Our work is dedicated to helping students thrive by equipping educators with the tools and insights they need to support learning. We partner with schools, districts, and SEAs nationwide to develop research-based strategies for assessing performance and using the results to benefit students.

With decades of experience in assessment development, we design workshops that help teachers move beyond “teaching to the test.” These workshops help educators understand grade-level expectations and state summative assessments, allowing them to better prepare their students to master the critical content as outlined in the standards while preparing them for success on the state assessments.

Delivered online or in person, our customizable workshops range from 1 to 3 days and address the topics most relevant to educators, ensuring that every session directly contributes to improving student outcomes.

Assessment Principles Workshops

We offer workshops that discuss the general principles and purposes of standardized assessments, such as formative, interim, summative, and through-year assessments. Teachers learn about how these assessments relate to each other, how they are different and similar to one another, and how they can be used to improve learning outcomes for students. Teachers learn about the purposes and components of these assessments, how they relate to state academic content standards, and how they are designed. We also can address the best practices for assessment development to guide teachers in creating their own classroom assessments to match the rigor and expectations of the state ​​assessments.

Three things you can do right away to improve the quality of your tests:

• Check to see if you can align your test questions with the state content standards.
• Ask yourself if your test questions address topics that you expect your students to know after they leave your classroom at the end of the year.
• Avoid writing answer options that are obviously wrong to help your students answer a question.

Item Writing Workshops

We also offer workshops that focus on supporting teachers in writing and evaluating high-quality assessment items. These workshops can address a wide range of topics based on the desired goals. The workshops can be tailored to address any of the following topics.

• Understanding Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics and assessments
• Understanding the Next Generation Science Standards and assessments
• Alignment with standards and item specifications
• Principles of universal design, accessibility, and item writing
• Best practices to support reliability and validity
• Item language and structure
• Bias, sensitivity, and cultural responsiveness
• Grade-level appropriateness
• Differences and similarities between K–2, 3–5, and 6–HS
• Item type characteristics (e.g., Multiple-Choice, Technology-Enhanced, Open-Response)
• Cognitive complexity
• Item difficulty
• Distractor rationales
• Delivery mode considerations (i.e., print, digital)
• Stimuli and graphics
• Item rubrics
• Characteristics of strong items and flawed items
• Foundational knowledge of psychometric concepts

We tailor our workshops to the interests and needs of each client. Our team of content specialists, many of whom have worked as teachers in K‒12 public schools, have years of experience in developing standardized assessments across content areas. They work closely with teachers to show them how to improve their understanding of principles of sound assessments and enhance their item-writing skills. We include both large group and small group activities. After the workshops, clients can also request that WestEd provide office hours to give one-on-one feedback to educators and/or review and provide feedback for items written by their staff to help them hone their item development skills.

Past participants in our workshops have noted the following:

“Being able to connect the benchmark clarification to the complexity and item intent helps provide a greater understanding of how/why current items are written the way they are.” —Florida Joint Center for Citizenship/The Lou Frey Institute (2019)

“This was a valuable workshop to me because now I have experience with how to create non-multiple-choice questions. I will be able to show my students more examples of these types of problems and start implementing them in my lessons.” —STAAR New Item Types Workshop (2021)

Work With WestEd

Contact us to learn how we can bring professional learning for assessments to your district or school.

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Andrew Bell is the Social Studies Assessment Development Manager in Assessment Design and Development at WestEd. Since joining WestEd in 2002, Dr. Bell has performed numerous duties for high-stakes assessment projects, overseeing content development for social studies assessments, developing test designs, conducting item-writing training workshops, creating achievement level descriptors (ALDs), and participating in standard setting meetings.