New! TSIA 2.0 mathematics bank

We’re happy to announce a bank of more than 4000 original questions for the TSIA 2.0 mathematics test. In the following sections, we’ll describe how the bank was developed, provide links to sample documents, and share ideas for making best use of the questions.

We should mention at the outset: while the bank is designed around the TSIA 2.0 test blueprint, its topical organization lends itself to broader uses. A large portion of the questions match up well with the TEKS and can help with regular instruction and assessment. Many are also appropriate for ACT/SAT prep or a college placement exam.

Important: the TSIA bank is licensed separately from other banks in Problem-Attic and is not automatically included with a school subscription. Further down we explain the license requirements.

Background

As you may know, there are not many sample questions available for TSIA 2.0. The College Board has released only about 80 questions in total, and it has not posted any complete practice tests. Here is TEA’s public information and the College Board’s practice resources.

To create a TSIA bank for Problem-Attic, we had to get around the limited number of examples. We did it in several ways: through careful analysis of the test blueprint and relationship between the official 25 topics and TEKS; by looking at published examples for the Accuplacer test, which is closely related; and by reviewing questions in hundreds of actual college readiness/placement exams and study guides.

Even after a thorough investigation, we may have missed a few types of questions or subtopics that could conceivably be on the test. But we are confident that we lifted the veil off TSIA and produced a comprehensive bank of high-quality questions. Notably, they’re all written by humans (not AI-generated). They’re wide-ranging enough to cover all relevant math skills, and we believe their level of difficulty, which does vary, is on average a good match for the TSIA test. (We’ll say more about level of difficulty below.)

Organization

Early on it was apparent that the TSIA bank had to be organized differently than other banks in Problem-Attic. We knew it would be used for two purposes: (1) the creation of tests which follow the TSIA blueprint, and (2) regular instruction, which might involve remediation or a focus on specific skills. The result is a bank where the questions are split into two groups, called “Diagnostic” and “Practice”, as shown here:

If you click either tab, you’ll see questions organized by TSIA’s 4 domains and 25 topics. The Practice tab is further divided into subtopics, to help with instruction. Here is a screenshot:

Of course, the questions in the Diagnostic and Practice tabs can be used for either purpose. Roughly speaking, the number of questions is in a 1:2 ratio, Diagnostic to Practice. No questions are duplicated, but you will see similar coverage, or even closely matching questions, if you click either tab and drill down into the database. For a breakdown of coverage, including question counts, see this table of contents.

Difference between Diagnostic and Practice Tabs

While you can go back and forth between the Diagnostic and Practice tabs when choosing questions, there are important differences. The most obvious is the organization of Practice questions around subtopics. These do not come from the test blueprint. EducAide created them to help with the teaching (or review) of specific concepts and skills which are implicit in TSIA’s official 25 topics.

A second difference has to do with the style of questions and level of difficulty. If you click the Practice tab, you will see a greater variance compared to the Diagnostic tab. In part, this comes from the larger number of questions. It is also a way to check on foundational skills which may not actually be tested, to extend topics, or to challenge students. (It’s probably not a bad thing to “over-prepare” them.)

Here’s a graphical representation of how the two tabs differ:

The narrower range of questions for the Diagnostic tab is to make any tests that you create more reliable. There is variability, but it is more limited than what you’ll see in the Practice tab. Our goal was to support ongoing assessment, or regular checks on student progress, while also making it possible to select questions randomly.

Please see our instructions below for quickly and efficiently creating a 48-question TSIA test. Here are links to two sample tests that we created following those instructions: document 1 / document 2

Paired Questions

Like all EducAide original banks, the TSIA questions are done in pairs. That is, when browsing questions, you’ll see two in a row that are very similar. This is meant to help with the creation of test forms A & B, pre- and post-tests, etc.

The pairing is tied to two options in Problem-Attic:

• Filter. If you think of the pairs as being odd- and even-numbered, you can hide one set or the other when browsing questions. One reason for doing this is to keep half the questions in reserve, say, for tests and quizzes, while using the other half for homework.

• Parallel Forms. Problem-Attic can automatically switch between odd- and even-numbered questions when you start with a copy of a document. Using a bank like TSIA, this makes the creation of test forms A & B ridiculously easy! See this page to learn more.

Multiple-Choice

The TSIA test has all multiple-choice questions, and so does the bank in Problem-Attic. There are two implications.

1. You do not have to format and deliver the questions as multiple-choice. Problem-Attic can convert 60–70% of them to free-response by hiding the choices. You will see the option in two places:

   • Arrange tab. Here you can convert individual questions. Click on a thumbnail or question number in the “document tree”, then click the Details button. You will see an option to hide choices.

   • Format tab. Here you can convert all or most questions in your document to free-response. Click the Multiple Choice tab and click “Hide multiple-choice answers when possible”.

     Note: not every question is convertible. Some need their choices to make sense. In Problem-Attic, we’ve flagged those questions so that choices won’t be hidden by mistake.

2. You can control the number of choices. About half the questions in the TSIA bank are written with five choices. We did this because the style matches many college placement exams. Also, it can provide a little more test security or variability with test forms.

   You do not have to go with five choices in Problem-Attic. In fact, the default is set to a maximum of four. You can change this if you go to Format tab > Multiple Choice. For a consistent test layout, we suggest the default setting. However, if all questions that you select have five choices (you’ll know by looking at the thumbnails), then you might increase the maximum.

   Notes:

   • If a question is written with only four choices, raising the maximum will not add choices. Its purpose is to reduce the number for consistency or for a test accommodation.

   • When a question is written with more choices than the maximum, incorrect choices are discarded pseudo-randomly, based on the question’s position in a document. For variability, you can move questions around and get slightly different sets of choices.

How to create a TSIA Test

A TSIA test, according to the blueprint, always has 48 questions divided equally between the four domains (12 questions each). With diagnostic and practice questions separated in Problem-Attic, and with various shortcuts, you can quickly create a TSIA-like test.

In the following step-by-step instructions, we recommend that you select questions randomly. With just a little “over-selection” and fine-tuning, this should result in good coverage and an average level of difficulty which is close to the actual TSIA test. Of course, you’re welcome to mix random and individual selection, or choose exactly what you want for a test.

1. Log in to Problem-Attic and start a new document. Give it whatever name you prefer.

2. Open the TSIA bank (you may have to go to Browse all Banks to see it), and click the Diagnostic tab.

3. Right-click on the first domain, Quantitative Reasoning. Then click the flyout that says “Add Problems”.

4. In the dialog, type 15 for “Number of problems at random”, then click the Add button.

   

5. Right-click on the second domain, Algebraic Reasoning, and click “Add Problems”.

6. In the dialog, type 15 again for the number of problems. This time also select the option, “Put them in a new part of the document”. Then click Add.

7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 for the other two domains, Geometric and Spatial Reasoning, and Probabilistic and Statistical Reasoning.

8. Click the Arrange tab on the left and be sure you’re looking at Grid view. You will see the four parts that were created. With the slider at the top, you can adjust the number of columns to make problems easier to read. Now your job is to cut down each part from 15 to 12 problems. To do this, click the Remove button on problem thumbnails.

   

   Note: because everyone’s selections will be different, we can’t tell you what to remove. Due to randomness, you will likely see one or two problems that seem repetitive. You might see others that push the test in the direction of being too hard or too easy. These are good candidates for removal.

   Useful tip: on the Arrange tab, you can expand and collapse parts by clicking on a part icon in the document tree.

9. When the parts are cut down to a total of 48 problems, you’ve got a test ready to turn into a PDF or deliver online. Optionally, you can combine the parts and/or scramble the problems, so they are not in the same order as they were selected.

   • To combine parts, click on Part 4 in the document tree on the left, then click the Remove Part button. Accept the default option, “currently selected part”, then click Remove. Repeat this for Parts 3 and 2. All problems will then end up in Part 1. (A document always has at least one part.)

   • Click the Scramble button if you want problems to be in a random order. This affects problems within a part. If you don’t combine the parts, you’ll need to click the button for each.

Export to Canvas

If your school/district has adopted the Canvas LMS, and you’ve configured the API to work with Problem-Attic, there is a nice tie-in with document parts and potentially with the administration of TSIA tests.

Briefly, Problem-Attic can convert document parts into item banks in Canvas. Then those banks can be used for random selection groups in a quiz. For a quick demonstration, please see this video.

For TSIA, specifically, you can follow the above steps and create parts with more problems, perhaps 30 or 40, and export them to Canvas through the API. Then you will have a way to create TSIA-like tests by pulling in random groups of 12 problems from each domain, i.e., each bank. This may be a big help not just with diagnostics but with self-paced learning, as students can monitor their own progress.

For more information about configuring the Canvas API for use with Problem-Attic, see this page.

Licensing

As noted at the top, the TSIA bank is not automatically included with a school subscription. This is the first and only bank in Problem-Attic where that is true. The reason is that usage is likely to spread beyond a single school site, because many districts pull students together for TSIA prep or do it as a summer school class.

Thus, we are making the bank available to districts if one of the following is true:

• all secondary schools (meaning grades 6 and higher) have subscriptions to Problem-Attic, or
• the district has five or more high schools and they all have subscriptions to Problem-Attic.

For more information about licensing of the TSIA bank, please contact us. To learn more about school subscription, please go to www.problem-attic.com and click the Plans menu at the top.

Feedback and suggestions

We will continue to improve the bank so that questions are as good a match as possible for the actual TSIA test. Also, you can be assured that we’ll do an update when Texas switches to TSIA 3.0.

Your feedback is appreciated. Please let us know if we’ve missed any type of question or topic, or if anything seems too hard or too easy or out of scope for TSIA. The best way to provide feedback is to email us at support@problem-attic.com.