Problem-Attic’s support for the TEKS

Problem-Attic has great support for the TEKS, for both assessment and instruction. If you’re a Texas teacher, there’s much to tell you about.

STAAR Questions

Problem-Attic’s database has all STAAR questions, about 13,500, including Spanish. The questions are organized by subject, grade/course and year. For Mathematics and Science, there’s also a re-organization by TEKS.

In Problem-Attic, the banks with STAAR questions are called “TX Released”. If they are not appearing on the Select tab, then you’ll find them by clicking Browse All Banks. You can select questions there, or for convenience, add the titles to My Banks.

Important: the STAAR questions are freely available, along with 220,000 other questions which are re-published in Problem-Attic. Under TEA rules, however, we can’t make them publicly available—only Texas teachers have permission to use them. This page explains how to get access: www.problem-attic.com/TX-released.

Practice Sets

We recently added STAAR Practice Sets to the TX released banks. That’s about 1750 more questions for all grades and subjects. They can be used like any others. Although they’re intended for online test practice, Problem-Attic can re-format them for use "offline". This might be for homework, lessons, one-on-one instruction, or various classroom activities.

If you’re not familiar with Problem-Attic, then we should mention that all of its PDF creation, sharing, and curriculum development tools are freely available. (No subscription is needed.) And the program can make all kinds of documents, from tests and worksheets to flash cards, exit tickets, overheads and problem-of-the-day calendars. The figure below shows questions being turned into a weekly calendar. For other ideas, see this video overview.

Language Switching: English and Spanish

What we call “Language Switching” used to be a subscriber feature in Problem-Attic. Now it’s available to everyone. With just a few clicks, you can produce matching documents in English and Spanish for Bilingual/ELL students. This feature works with nearly all of the grade 3–5 STAAR and Practice Set questions. To learn more, see this help page

More TEKS-Aligned Questions

In fall 2023, we updated the Select tab in Problem-Attic and introduced question banks. This made it easier to do virtual re-alignments, where questions from various states and organizations are copied into Texas-specific banks.

We’ve now done three re-alignments, and others are coming soon. Two of the three are available to all users of Problem-Attic. (No subscription is needed.)

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  Illustrative Mathematics – about 5400 questions for grades 1–8 and high school. The IM curriculum (also known as OpenUp) is highly respected, and when you see the questions, you’ll know why. They’re interesting, rigorous, varied, and graphically rich—and perhaps best of all, they’re aligned to TEKS.

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  New York Science – about 6000 questions for grades 6–8, Biology and Physics. These come from NY Regents Exams and Intermediate Level Tests. With help from Texas teachers, they’re aligned down to the SE level. There’s a mix of question types, and many of the multiple-choice questions are automatically convertible to free-response. To learn more about question conversion, see this help page.

The third re-alignment is called IM Paired Practice. This bank has about 4700 original questions (written by EducAide) and requires a school subscription. Our goal was to double what Illustrative Mathematics produced so teachers would have plenty of extra questions for review, quizzes, and tests. This doubling also takes advantage of an option in Problem-Attic for parallel forms. To learn more, see this help page.

Other State Assessments

STAAR tests are administered by a company called Cambium Learning. That same company does online assessments for other states, such as Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland and Ohio. All of their questions are in the Problem-Attic database and freely available.

Of course, other states’ questions aren’t aligned to the TEKS (except for those described above). Problem-Attic has tools that can help you do an alignment. Short of that, the questions are still useful for supplementing instruction and exposing students to different question types. Actually, about a dozen states have released questions which are very similar to those on STAAR tests.

In Problem-Attic, the questions from state assessments are organized multiple ways. For that reason, it’s easier than you might think to integrate them into your curriculum. The assessments are in the database in their original form, by state, subject, year (up to 2023) and grade. They’re also organized topically and, when possible, by standard. The standards are often a close match to the TEKS.

Keep in mind that questions are individually selectable in Problem-Attic and they can be re-formatted for different purposes. If you’ve been pulling down PDFs from state websites and cutting and pasting or retyping, you’ll be amazed at what Problem-Attic can do. Simply select the questions you like and tell the program how they should be formatted. You’ll get a beautiful-looking, fully-customized document!

TEKS Mathematics

This bank, which has upwards of 25,000 original questions, has gone through a major revision for the new STAAR test. It covers almost 100% of the mathematics TEKS/SEs for grades grades 1–8 and high school, and they’re all paired.

Below are two sample documents which show EducAide’s original questions and how you can create matching forms A and B. You can download the PDFs and check out the paired questions. To learn more about the parallel forms option, see this help page.

In the TEKS math bank, about 5000 questions have recently been re-written or are brand-new. Many are modeled after those we’ve seen on STAAR released tests, including about 1000 which are interactive or “technology enhanced”. For the re-writes, we’ve increased the rigor and converted many to newer question types. For example, questions that were multiple-choice are now multi-select, and free response questions have scorable answers which students can enter using a virtual math keyboard.

All questions in the TEKS Mathematics bank are written by EducAide, so the bank requires a school subscription. However, you can preview and make use of a sample database in what’s called the Play Area.

Interactive Question Types

Problem-Attic’s online test engine and editor have been updated to support nearly all question types on STAAR. When we added the Practice Sets in late 2023, there were only 20 questions out 1700 that we couldn’t make interactive. (They’re mostly graphing questions, as shown in this PDF.) We recently finished work on inequalities and x-y coordinate systems, and that number has fallen to just 6!

Problem-Attic actually goes beyond STAAR in terms of interactivity. Its support for clickable areas (hot spots), column matching, drag-and-drop, associative tables (grid match), menus, and custom answer fields is unmatched by any other assessment platform. Plus, we’ve made it very easy to switch between question types—you’re not locked into “templates”—so you can start with existing questions and quickly convert them to modern, high-level TEIs.

We’ve created a Problem-Attic document that shows a variety of interactive question types. You can access it three ways:

PDF document   Problem-Attic document   online test

The document is nominally for U.S. History, Revolutionary War Period, but the question-writing techniques work for any subject area. With the online test, you can see the interactive questions, just as students would. With the PDF, you can see how they look in printed form. With the link to the Problem-Attic document, you can open a copy, add/remove questions, change the formatting, and create your own PDF. (If you’re at a subscribing school, you can also modify the questions or use them as models for new ones.)

This video and help page will tell you more about Problem-Attic’s support for interactive questions. Note: as we write this page, we’re in the process of adding new types of graphing questions. If you’re a math teacher, return to this page soon and you’ll see an announcement.

Other Program Features

Besides content, there are new program features which you may not have discovered yet. Here are video links:

New Present tab
One-click export to Google
Export to Canvas
Export to Schoology

Please contact us if you’d like more information about TX Released banks or the program features described here. We want you to get the most use out of Problem-Attic regardless of whether you’re at a subscribing school.