Texas STAAR Test: A Parent's Guide

What is STAAR?

STAAR stands for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. It's the standardized test the Texas Education Agency (TEA) administers to every public-school student in Texas from grade 3 through high school. It replaced TAKS in 2012.

STAAR measures whether your kid has mastered the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) — the official Texas curriculum standards — for their grade and subject. Schools use the results to plan instruction. Districts use them for accountability ratings. Parents use them to figure out what their kid actually knows.

Which grades take STAAR?

• Grade 3: Math, Reading
• Grade 4: Math, Reading
• Grade 5: Math, Reading, Science
• Grade 6: Math, Reading
• Grade 7: Math, Reading
• Grade 8: Math, Reading, Science, Social Studies
• High school (End-of-Course exams): Algebra I, English I, English II, Biology, U.S. History

Kindergarten, grades 1, and 2 do not take STAAR. (If a school has an "early STAAR readiness" assessment, that's an internal tool, not the state test.)

When does STAAR happen?

STAAR is administered in two main windows each school year:

• Spring window (April): the big one. Most grade-level STAAR tests fall here.
• December End-of-Course window: for high school students retaking EOC exams.

TEA publishes the exact dates each summer for the upcoming school year. Your kid's school will send home a notice ~2-4 weeks before test day with the specific dates for their grade.

The test is online-only as of 2023 (paper-based STAAR was phased out). Kids take it on a Chromebook or iPad supplied by the school, through the Cambium Assessment portal.

How are STAAR scores reported?

Every STAAR result gets sorted into one of four performance levels:

• Masters Grade Level — your kid is strongly prepared for the next grade. Top tier.
• Meets Grade Level — your kid is prepared for the next grade. This is the "passing" target most districts care about.
• Approaches Grade Level — your kid needs targeted intervention but isn't far off.
• Did Not Meet Grade Level — your kid needs significant support to catch up.

You also get a scaled score (a number between roughly 1100 and 1900, depending on grade) and a per-reporting-category breakdown showing which TEKS strands your kid did well on and which ones they didn't.

That per-strand breakdown is the most useful part of the score report — it tells you where the gaps are. A "Approaches" score in Math could mean your kid is great at computation and weak at fractions, or vice versa. Look at the strand breakdown.

What's actually on the test?

STAAR uses a mix of question types:

• Multiple choice (most questions) — pick one of four answer choices.
• Multi-select — pick two or three correct answers from a list.
• Grid-in / equation — type a numeric answer into a grid (no choices).
• Drag-and-drop — order steps, sort items into categories.
• Hot-spot — click a specific point on a diagram or chart.
• Short constructed response (Reading/Writing) — type 2-4 sentence answers.

Each grade has 34-40 questions typically (varies by subject). The test is timed at 4 hours but most kids finish in 90-120 minutes.

What scores mean for your kid (and what they don't)

What scores mean: they're a snapshot of where your kid stood against grade-level expectations on one specific day. The strand breakdown shows what they know and what they don't.

What scores don't mean: they don't determine whether your kid is "smart." They don't decide grade promotion in most cases (Texas eliminated the grade-3 reading retest in 2021; grade 5 and 8 retests are now optional in most districts). They don't define your kid's future. They are one data point.

Don't tell your kid the STAAR score "determines" anything. Telling kids that loads up test anxiety, which actively hurts performance. Tell them it's practice that shows their teachers what to teach next. That's true and it's calming.

What to do about it

Three things, in order of impact:

1. Make the test format familiar. Kids who've seen multi-select questions, grid-in answers, and the Cambium online interface before the test day do meaningfully better. The questions aren't harder than what they see in school; the format is just different. Free TEKS-aligned worksheets here let you do this without paying anything.
2. Practice 15-20 minutes a day, not 2 hours on Saturday. Spaced practice beats cramming. See our 8 strategies that work without nightly meltdowns for how to set this up.
3. Focus on the weakest strand from last year's report. If your kid had "Approaches" on math and the strand breakdown said "Algebraic Reasoning" was the weakest, that's where to put the practice time. Doubling down on what they already know wastes weeks.

How GradeEarn fits in (be honest about it)

We built GradeEarn because the free STAAR-prep resources on the internet are mostly typo-riddled PDFs with wrong answer keys, and the paid alternatives charge $20-50 a month for the same content the curriculum publishers print on demand. Our model: free TEKS-aligned questions, free printable worksheets, free online practice with an AI tutor that walks kids through wrong answers, and an optional toy-marketplace incentive that ships actual toys to your door for correct answers.

You don't have to pay anything to use the free worksheets. If your kid wants the toy-earning side of it, you create a free account. Either path is fine.

Next: how to actually prep at home

Read the companion piece: How to Prep for STAAR at Home — 8 strategies that work. Or jump straight to free worksheets by grade.