13-digit ISBN: 978-0-9835171-3-4
(10-digit ISBN: 0-9835171-3-9)

Middle school students in Texas are now required to take the STAAR Test in Grade 8 Social Studies.  Our Grade 8 Social Studies Test Bank is designed to help you meet the need for high-quality, STAAR-type items based on the Grade 8 Social Studies TEKS.

Our Grade 8 Social Studies Test Bank has 814 assessment items.  All of the assessed TEKS are covered, with a multitude of questions for every TEKS.

The test bank is organized to follow the TEKS. Each TEKS, found in a gray box at the top of the page, begins a new section. There are at least three or more STAAR-type questions for each TEKS. The questions run the gamut from easy to challenging –– both in content and cognitive complexity. They cover all of the performance level descriptors from Level I to Level III (“Advance Academic Performance”).

Each question is designed to test student mastery of a specific TEKS. These questions are different from those in Mastering the TEKS in Grade 8 Social Studies and can provide you with a true snapshot of what your students know for diagnostic purposes.  These questions will also give your students practice in answering questions they have not seen before, in order to better prepare them for the STAAR Test.

Most important of all, you will find maps, documentary excerpts, photographs, and diagrams as part of many questions –– just like those on the actual STAAR Test.  Our test bank is so large and has such a wide range of questions that you will be able to use some items for classroom quizzes, tests and games — and still have plenty of questions left for district-wide Benchmark tests.  Since most required documents are also included, some questions can also be used for classroom instruction and discussion.

Dr. Rosemary Morrow, former Director of Social Studies at the TEA, has been kind enough to classify all 814 questions in the Grade 8 Test Bank. Dr. Morrow divided our questions into three separate categories: easy, average or challenging.  We asked Dr. Morrow not to use any single kind of strict classification scheme, but rather to rely on her own instincts and experience with the curriculum from her experience as a teacher, as a supervisor and while she was at the TEA,. In making her classification, Dr. Morrow took into account the content difficulty, reading level, and distractors as well as the skills being tested. She classified about one quarter of the test bank's questions as easy, another quarter as challenging, and about half of the questions as average.  The purpose of this classification is to provide guidance to teachers in using our assessment items: it may be most logical, for example, to begin by using the easier questions for each TEKS with students and then to work up to the more challenging questions. Dr. Morrow has also been kind enough to dual code about one-quarter of the items.

Because our test bank follows the TEKS themselves, navigating the test bank’s many pages of questions is quite easy. Each TEKS appears in order and each new TEKS begins on a separate page. (The TEKS appear in the same order as in the Texas Standards, and not as they appear in the TEA’s Assessed Curriculum booklet.)

Use of these items is licensed by us to your district in perpetuity, but only for use within your district. We will ask you to sign a licensing agreement to this effect. Your district is buying the use of these items not just for this year, but also for every year in the future.  

This test bank is sold on a district basis only. Prices for the Grade 8 Social Studies Test Bank are based on your district’s total population size, determined by the TEA’s most recent “Snapshot,” which is available at this link:

https://rptsvr1.tea.texas.gov/perfreport/snapshot/2016/district.srch.html

Please bear in mind that this is based on your district’s total population size, not just its Grade 8 population.

Test Bank Pricing

Documents

• Sample Pages (PDF)
• Descriptive Flier (PDF)
• Licensing Agreement (PDF)

To see a PowerPoint presentation about the Grade 8 Social Studies Test Bank and related resources, click below:

• Grade 8 Social Studies Resources (PPT)

Videos

To learn more about the Grade 8 Social Studies TEKS and related products from our affiliate, Jarrett Publishing Company, please watch this video: