STAAR Science Test: What Grades 5 and 8 Cover and How to Prepare
For a Texas family, the STAAR Science test is one of the first big academic checkpoints — and one of the most revealing. Students take STAAR Science in grade 5 and again in grade 8 (with a Biology end-of-course exam in high school), and year after year most of them do not meet grade level. On the 2026 STAAR, about 36% of fifth graders and 54% of eighth graders met grade level in science, according to Texas Education Agency results — meaning roughly two in three fifth graders still fell short. The good news: those outcomes have far more to do with how science is taught over the years than with how a child crams the week before.
What is the STAAR Science test?
STAAR stands for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness. The science assessment is given in grade 5 and grade 8, and it measures the TEKS — the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, the state's science standards. The redesigned STAAR mixes traditional multiple-choice items with newer question types that ask students to interpret data, explain reasoning, and work through multi-step problems. It is cumulative by design: the grade 5 test draws on what students were meant to learn across grades 3 to 5, and the grade 8 test spans grades 6 to 8.
What the STAAR Science test covers
Both the grade 5 and grade 8 tests are organized into the same four reporting categories: Matter and Energy; Force, Motion, and Energy; Earth and Space; and Organisms and Environments. In grade 8 that is roughly 38 questions spread across the four. A strong score depends on genuine breadth — a child can be comfortable with life science and still lose a quarter of the test on earth and space. And because the content is cumulative across several grades, there is simply too much to rebuild in a few review sessions.
Why so many students fall short
The pattern in the scores points to a root cause: in many Texas elementary schools, science is not a serious, daily subject. It is folded into other lessons or fit in when there is time, which often means very little dedicated science instruction. Grade 5 science on the 2026 STAAR (36% at grade level) is improving but still trails pre-pandemic results, while grade 8 has climbed to just over half. A test that assesses three or more years of layered content is unforgiving when the foundation was thin — the gaps that opened quietly in grades 3 and 4 show up all at once on test day.
How to prepare for the STAAR Science test
The fix is not a cram book. Because the test is cumulative, the students who do well are the ones who practiced science steadily, in order, across the years — the same way they practiced math. Practically, that means three things: cover all four reporting categories rather than a child's favorites; practice with exam-style questions so the format is familiar; and make sure wrong answers get explained, so a mistake becomes a corrected concept instead of a repeated one.
That is the model eiveon is built on. The science course runs grade by grade for grades 1 through 8, and every chapter is mapped to the TEKS (alongside NGSS and ten more US state frameworks), with the coverage shown chapter by chapter on the curriculum page. For grades 5 and 8 specifically, every chapter is tagged to the TEKS and spans the same matter and energy, force and motion, earth and space, and organisms and environments content the STAAR assesses. Each topic runs Learn, then Practice with every answer explained, then Apply with exam-style questions. The aim is to build the knowledge the TEKS standards assess, a little every day — not to teach to one test or promise a particular score.
What grades take the STAAR Science test?
Science is tested on STAAR in grade 5 and grade 8, with a Biology end-of-course assessment in high school. Reading and math are tested more often, but science lands at these two checkpoints — which is why the grade 5 result matters as an early signal of whether the foundation is there.
How is the STAAR Science test different from the CAST?
They are the same idea in two states. STAAR is Texas's test, built on the TEKS; the CAST is California's science test, built on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Both assess grade 5 and grade 8 across life, physical, and earth and space science, and both reward the same thing: steady, cumulative understanding built over years rather than memorized in a season.