Preparation has already begun at Batesville Junior High School for the next Mississippi Curriculum Test-2nd Edition, though the test is 250 days away.

Students in grades six through eight all over Mississippi will be tested over three days next May on their knowledge of math and language arts.

The curriculum test is a part of the State Department of Education’s system of assessing its public schools every year. Among school personnel and children alike, it’s hard to miss the increased stress levels that accompany the approach of the test dates.

That’s because the state’s measure of a school’s success is tied to its students’ test scores.

There is no immediate feedback. It takes three months for the grades to come back.

Two weeks ago teachers and school administrators got the results of last spring’s tests, which showed generally incremental improvement across the South Panola District over the previous year.

The South Panola School District’s sixth grade last year had six percent more students who scored “proficient” (indicating solid academic performance in the subjects) than they had the year before as fifth graders on both sections of the MCT-2.

Sixth grade language arts teacher Minnie Beardain said she worked with her students in small groups, with children of similar ability working together. Sixth grade math teacher Misty Wright said she had focussed on key words and math terminology to prepare her students for last spring’s tests. Word problems, not computational work, make up most of the math portion of the MCT-2, Wright said.

Batesville Junior High teachers who talked with The Panolian this week seemed driven to help their students reach higher levels of achievement.

“Sometimes we just encourage them to try harder, to do better,” Wright said. “Some students don’t know they should be doing that.”

The teachers talk about “rigor,” placing increased academic demands on their students.

It means reaching higher and digging deeper.

“So many of the students we teach are right there, within a few points of being at the next level,” eighth grade math teacher Carrie Doubleday said, referring to the individual academic classifications (“basic,” “proficient,” “advanced”) resulting from the test.

Because proficiency in reading is necessary for success on both the math and language arts segments of the MCT-2, at BJH students are getting more attention in literacy.

“We’re spending more time on reading,” Principal Leslie Busby said. “We’ve hired reading coaches to work with students one-on-one. We’ve expanded our AR (Accelerated Reader) program to all three grades.”

The AR program uses standardized tests to assess the comprehension of students once they’ve completed reading a book of their own selection.

The teachers agree that they try to familiarize their students with vocabulary commonly used on the MCT-2, words like “infer,” “justify,” and “analyze.” They work to get students accustomed to the structure and wording of the test, and even expose them to type fonts and graphics common to the MCT-2.

Busby anticipates repeating his “30 Day Push” next spring in the days leading up to the MCT-2.

Essentially, the teachers work cooperatively to create “bell-ringers,” short quizzes of five or six review problems or questions to be answered at the beginning of each class period.

“We use bell-ringers all year long,” seventh grade English teacher Sandy Snelling said. “They don’t come in asking what we’re going to do today.”