Pathway to Progress: End-of-Year Test Prep with Roadmaps

As the end of the year approaches, you will want to make sure that students are as prepared as possible to take their end-of-year exams. But how can you use Teach to One: Roadmaps to do that? In this article, we’ll explore how you can use the new Assign function to help your students prep for their upcoming tests.

When you look at a skill in Roadmaps, you have the option to assign it to all of your students or to a subset of them. When you click on Assign, you will have the option to Assign a Skill or Assign a Skill Pathway. It would be totally understandable to think, “I need my students working on grade-level skills so they can do well on the state exam,” but we recommend assigning a skill pathway.

When assigning a pathway, you build the essential support skills students need to be successful in learning the target skill into the assignment. Students who have yet to learn those key support skills will be assigned them, and students who don’t need them don’t have to go over them again. It’s a great way to personalize!

There is always a dilemma, especially at this time of year, about whether to push students to engage with grade-level skills they might not be fully prepared for, or to continue to meet them where they are. Your intuition might tell you that the best chance they have for success on their end-of-year test is to try to engage with that grade level content, but hold on…

Over the years, our data has shown that students get better results on their year-end tests when they learn the essential support skills, even when they don’t pass the grade-level skills. We think this is because students need to learn at their own pace, and when we push them to try to learn skills they are not prepared for, they get frustrated, lose confidence, and tend not to make sense of or retain the new information. However, when they learn related skills that are in their zone of proximal development, they are better able to make sense of them, and they gain the confidence they need to apply those skills when they’re tested.

But what skills should you assign a pathway toward? That decision is up to you, and depends on the needs of your students, but here are a few skills at each grade level that could prove beneficial:

4th Grade: Additive Area (589) Division & Remainders (390) Equivalent Fraction Products (656)	5th Grade: Multiply Decimals by Decimals (577) Add & Subtract Fractions Word Problems (649) Multiply Mixed Numbers (187)	6th Grade: Polygons on Coordinate Plane (648) Real World Percents (292) Evaluate Algebraic Expressions (116)
7th Grade: Problems Involving Equations & Inequalities (526) Ratios & Proportions (230) Solve Problems with +/- Rational #s (522)	8th Grade: Number of Solutions to Equations (601) Analyze & Compare Linear Relationships (232) Sequences of Transformations (205)	Algebra: Solve Linear Equations Problems (358) Average Rate of Change (554) Factor Quadratics (285)