Bringing AI into state test prep: Here’s why it’s a good thing

You know the drill: state test season approaches, and suddenly everyone is emphasizing test prep. The pressure is on to review content and practice test-taking skills to support the best performance possible from students.

Educators and administrators alike can agree that many teachers opt out of dedicated test prep. Creating review material for all the content covered in the year up until that point is time-consuming. Using class time for test prep feels like taking time away from instruction. 

At the same time, digital testing has become increasingly popular. Digital literacy skills are a prerequisite to testing success so students can confidently focus on the test content instead of the tech.

Preparing students for success on rigorous state tests is important, but difficult. Technology can help, particularly AI. When we think about how AI is “revolutionizing” education, it’s simple tasks like saving teachers time by automating processes they already do where we see its biggest impact. 

Support all learners with digital literacy skills

It’s easy to assume this generation of digital natives has built-in digital literacy skills that generations before didn’t have. Many do, but a lack of tech equity at home or even in schools limits many digital skills due to differing levels of access to technology.

No one wants to be that student who has to raise your hand to ask how a tech tool works in a room full of students who already figured it out. Digital literacy skills, or the lack of, may go unseen and show up as lower performance on tests.

Daily instruction with technology increases digital literacy skills without taking away time from class instruction. Using interactive technology built for assessing students via tests, homework, or other assignments is an easy way to level the playing field to support all students, and develop familiarity with typical standardized testing formats. 

Districts partnering with Quizizz for test prep are focused on developing student familiarity with question types they usually see on standardized tests. Now, these 18+ question types are used for daily instruction and content practice in classrooms around the world. By the time students get to the test they’ve seen the format and are used to practicing the skills in their standards in that format.

Using a new tech tool in the classroom can be daunting, that’s where AI comes in and helps teachers save time. AI can be used to generate Quizizz question types and align them to your standards. It also helps enhance those questions further to create meaningful practice opportunities where students relate their curriculum to real-world scenarios or even have it translated into another language if needed.

The Quizizz instructional suite has built-in digital literacy skill development through simple daily use for assignments or quizzes. At the same time, teachers can create or enhance them quickly with AI. Now, students can focus on mastering their curriculum content and standards instead of mastering the format or technology.

Review content, but don’t lose instructional time

The time between those first lessons at the beginning of the school year and state testing in March or April is huge. While those lessons typically build on each other, many educators find it valuable to review some of those early concepts in isolation to boost testing confidence.

Better long-term retention is the goal, but developing dedicated review resources can take a lot of time to create. Resources are hard to find, hard to create, and difficult to differentiate for students.

Reviewing curriculum should be focused on the practice of key math and ELA skills rather than re-instruction and that practice should be done in short, bite-sized amounts consistently.

Quizizz is an easy way to achieve practice of previous skills. With Quizizz, students can get a gamified and differentiated quick practice. Mastery Peak provides spaced repetition with gamification to create an engaging learning experience focused on student accuracy. Students reattempt incorrectly answered questions while teachers observe student progress.

Instead of teachers making practice opportunities from scratch they can use the Quizizz library to find pre-made standards-aligned resources, import something they already have using AI, or generate a new standards-aligned practice with AI. This eliminates the need for teachers to use class time for practice and take time away from instruction.

There are a lot of ways to practice on Quizizz, including creating flashcards, but teachers and administrators alike have told us they need quick ways to grade these practice opportunities too. Quizizz resources are autograded and with the power of AI, teachers can even autograde written responses according to their evaluation criteria.

Whether teachers are bringing in their practice opportunities into Quizizz or uploading state practice tests to digitize them, Quizizz AI makes the process so much easier. Tasks that used to be time-consuming like taking a screenshot for questions with diagrams and uploading that into an instructional platform now take seconds as Quizizz AI pulls not only the questions but also the images and diagrams into the platform, identifying the question types on its own so your favorite resources stay exactly as they are and don’t lose their academic rigor.

Emphasize reading analysis

Reading skills are lower than ever right now, but students are still expected to analyze passages for standardized tests. These tests include long informational text, or sometimes fiction passages, and challenging questions that assess a student’s ability to comprehend, analyze, and evaluate written material. 

These questions aren’t limited to only ELA tests either, with an emphasis on cross-curricular literacy, standardized tests require students to be able to analyze and write about what they know in nearly every subject area.

An easy win for teachers is practicing comprehension skills regularly in the classroom, but finding passages at the right reading levels for every student can sometimes feel like an impossible task.

Quizizz Passages provides teachers in every subject and grade with a quick AI solution. Teachers can import, embed, or have AI generate a passage for students to analyze. It also generates questions. Teachers control the standard alignment, comprehension skills, topics, and subtopics the questions and passages focus on.

For students, Passages gives them the same experience as a state test. They read and respond to a set of questions about a text, and even write about it. Practicing this experience consistently all year long helps students develop critical reading skills and improve their literary analysis skills. Students can demonstrate they can draw logical conclusions about something they read, show they can find text evidence, identify main ideas, and even evaluate arguments.

Quizizz AI challenges the test prep status quo. It helps teachers shift from rote, isolated drills to meaningful daily practice that fosters critical thinking and builds digital literacy skills. With Quizizz AI powering question types, curriculum content and reviews, and text analysis, you can help teachers help their students with testing success, all without it being a time-consuming burden.