Mae Nevarez is an IXL Professional Learning Specialist with nearly a decade of experience as a teacher, instructional coach, educational technology specialist, and acting principal of her district’s first online school.

The end of the school year is quickly approaching, and you know what that means: testing season has arrived.  

Educators need to get their students ready for state tests and end-of-year exams, and IXL has a variety of ways to help. Whether you need to gauge what students know or give your learners material to review, here are four IXL features that can help you get your class prepped for high-stakes exams.

Real-Time Diagnostic

One of the best tools IXL has for determining student readiness for state testing is the Real-Time Diagnostic. Our flexible and lightweight diagnostic is built to keep student data updated. After the initial assessment, students only need to answer 10-15 diagnostic questions per week to give you accurate data on their grade-level proficiency in math and English language arts.

Plus, the diagnostic provides a personalized action plan for each student with skills they should work on to close knowledge gaps and grow. If you have time built into your schedule for state testing review, it’s easy to have students work on skills from their lowest strand in Math or ELA. You can also print their personalized plan and send it home as part of homework in the weeks leading up to state assessments.

IXL Quizzes

Get a window into what students know with IXL Quizzes, a flexible tool that lets you draw questions from IXL skills to build assessments for just about any concept. You might create an end-of-unit assessment over multiple skills to see if students are ready for the next unit, or you could make a mock state test for learners to work through and review.

It’s also easy to make matching pre- and post-tests using Quizzes thanks to the copy feature. After you make a quiz as a pre-test, just copy the quiz, edit the copy, and select “Generate a new question” for each question. Voilà! In a few minutes you have a post-test that covers the same material, but has different questions.

You can even share IXL Quizzes with other teachers who are on the same school or district license as you, so your colleagues can benefit from your materials.

One last teacher tip: Pin Skill Plans that are relevant to your class, which will make it easier to find skills to create your perfect assessment.

Resetting SmartScores

After giving an end-of-unit assessment, you might realize your class struggled on a particular concept. When you finish a reteach, consider giving your class a fresh start on related skills by resetting their SmartScores.

This won’t delete any historical data in Analytics, but will simply start students at 0 so that you can gauge if they’ve retained knowledge in those skills. Use that data to inform any further review your class needs.

To reset SmartScores, head to the Skill Analysis report and search for the skills you’d like to reset using their Skill IDs. From there you can decide if you’d like to reset the skills for all of your students, a specific class, or for specific students.

Checkpoints

If you teach 8th grade math, Algebra 1, or Geometry, IXL Checkpoints are perfect for assessing students ahead of state and end-of-unit tests.

Checkpoints are specifically built to align with the rigor of state assessments, and require students to use higher-order thinking to solve problems across key standards. If students show some gaps in their knowledge, IXL will suggest foundational skills to work on in order for them to close those gaps.

The best part about Checkpoints is the data that they’ll provide in the Skill Analysis report. This report will allow you to quickly see which students have demonstrated proficiency on the Checkpoint’s standards and which students need review. It will even group students for you and provide a list of skills for those groups to work on, so you can jump into reviews right away.

With IXL, you can make sure that your students close out the school year strong by giving tests their best effort! Before the last day, also check out IXL’s summer resources to keep the learning going over summer break.