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Understanding Standardized Testing: What’s Changing in 2025 and How to Help Your Child Prepare

Standardized testing has long shaped how schools, colleges, and parents measure student achievement. Yet in 2025, testing looks very different from even a few years ago. With the shift to digital exams, evolving admission policies, and new adaptive scoring systems, families are navigating unfamiliar territory.

This guide explains what’s changing, why it matters, and how you can help your child prepare for success.

1. The Big Picture: How Standardized Testing Is Evolving Digital delivery becomes the default

The SAT is now fully digital worldwide, following the U.S. rollout in 2024. Students take the exam on laptops or tablets using secure testing software. The test’s adaptive design adjusts question difficulty based on performance, offering a faster and more individualized experience.
→ College Board reports that the digital SAT takes about two hours—nearly an hour shorter than the paper version.

The ACT is also moving toward digital testing, offering computer-based options in select states and planning full adoption by 2026. These adaptive exams aim to make assessments more precise and accessible.

Shorter, more focused tests

Students will notice leaner assessments across grade levels. The new SAT’s reading and writing sections are combined, with shorter passages and fewer questions. Similarly, the ACT is piloting reduced-length versions for school-day testing.

State K–12 tests are following suit. Many districts are trimming redundant assessments or integrating them into online

The Evolving Role of Interim Assessments

Let's talk about school tests. Remember those pop quizzes, final exams, and everything in between?

• Today, I'd like to introduce you to a type of assessment you may need to learn about - .
• In an ever-evolving education landscape, these play a crucial role.

Understanding Interim Assessments

Interim assessments are like temperature checks for learning.

They happen a few times throughout the school year, helping teachers gauge where students are in their learning process.

Unlike the pop quizzes that check daily learning or the end-of-year exams that measure what a student has learned, interim assessments sit snugly in between. These can be benchmarks to compare student learning against standards, diagnostics to pinpoint specific gaps, or progress monitoring tests to see how well a student is advancing in their learning journey.

Interim assessments are a type of educational assessment that is conducted at specific points during the school year to gauge students’ progress and provide feedback to teachers and administrators. Source:

The Importance of Interim Assessments

Think of your child's learning journey as a road trip.

• You wouldn't want to drive across the country without a GPS or roadmap, right?
• Interim assessments are like GPS, providing regular updates on where the students are.
• They help teachers navigate the teaching process more effectively.
• They allow teachers to adapt their instruction

How Scaffolding Could Change the Way Your Child Learns

It is a teacher’s job to shape the minds of the nation’s youth, teaching them the concepts and skills they’ll need to become functional adults.

• Early childhood education is critical.
• It can affect everything from a student’s future academic success to his mental and emotional health.

Every child learns differently. His educational success depends, in large part, on his teachers and their method of instruction.

• Children learn by listening, observing, exploring, and asking questions.
• The more a child understands the “what” and “why” of the lesson, the more motivated and engaged they will be.
• Scaffolding is an instructional tool teachers use to develop critical thinking skills and other skills they need to work more independently.

What is Instructional Scaffolding?

In higher education, students are often left to their own devices to take a project from the assignment phase to completion.

• A college professor might give a classroom full of students a research article and ask them to write a detailed essay about the critical topic.
• As the professor in this example, you might expect mixed results.
• Some students are more than capable of completing a project with minimal instruction, while others might struggle.
• In many ways, it comes down to how the student was taught in his early education years.

that breaks up a lesson or project into smaller pieces,

Preparing for college can be nerve-wracking for a high school student, even if you’ve already been accepted by a school. During that final year of high school, it may be difficult to concentrate on academics, but you want to show your college that you aren’t slacking off just because you’ve already been accepted. It is always important to do your best.

This video offers a step-by-step plan to help you organize your week.

As you prepare for college, not only should you be keeping up with your schoolwork, but you should take some time to evaluate your study habits to see if you are properly prepared for college. In this article, you’ll receive the top ten study tips to get you ready for the transition into college.

How Much Studying Do College Students Do?

According to a national study, the average full-time college student spends about 15 hours per week studying. Of course, the number of hours a student spends studying doesn’t necessarily correlate with their level of academic success. For example, students who studied an average of 20 hours per week or more were not always fully prepared for class, according to the results of a campus-wide student engagement survey. The amount of time students spend studying may also depend on their major and their class load. For example, senior engineering students reported 19 hours of study per week while students in the

Doing homework is an unavoidable part of being a student but some children have more trouble than others doing school work on their own at home. As a parent, it is your job to get your child the help he or she needs to learn and to thrive academically – you should also think about ways to create a healthy environment for doing homework at home. Keep reading to learn more about minimizing distractions and cultivating a good homework environment for your child.

The History of Homework

Homework has become a tradition in academic environments, but where does this tradition come from? The concept of extra school work that must be completed at home has become engrained in U.S. academic culture and some believe that it doesn’t provide much value for students. The use of homework has changed as the course of education in history has changed. During the late 19^th century, education for primary grades was irregular and most classrooms contained students of different ages. Primary students were rarely assigned homework and the older students got, the more likely they were to leave school for the workforce. In the early 20^th century, there was a rise in progressive education as well as an anti-homework movement. When the Cold War came around, however, homework once more rose its ugly head as America became obsessed about competing with the Russians. In the years since the pro-homework movement gained strength but it is once more starting to come into question.