The honest answer: less than most families assume, spread over more time than most families plan for.
It's a fair question with a slightly counterintuitive answer: for most students, more practice isn't the bottleneck — consistent, well-timed practice is. A student who practices 15 minutes, four times a week, for two months, is usually better prepared than one who crams an hour a day for the final week.
Long practice sessions run into diminishing returns fairly quickly — focus drops, mistakes increase from fatigue rather than lack of knowledge, and the session starts to feel like a punishment rather than useful practice. A tired, frustrated student retains less from an hour of practice than a focused student retains from fifteen minutes.
Cramming close to test day adds stress at exactly the wrong moment and rarely fixes a real skill gap — those take repeated exposure over time to close, not one long session.
For most elementary and middle school students, 45–60 minutes of total practice spread across the week (for example, 15 minutes, 3–4 times a week) starting 6–8 weeks before a state test is a reasonable, sustainable target — enough to build real familiarity and catch gaps early, without crowding out everything else in a student's week.
High school students preparing for something like a state end-of-course exam or a national test can reasonably do a bit more, but the same principle holds: consistency over weeks beats intensity over days.
If accuracy stops improving and a student starts making careless errors, that's a sign the session has gone on too long, not a sign to push through. Stopping there and picking back up the next day is more productive than powering through a frustrated hour.
A mix of untimed topic practice (to build specific skills, like fractions or reading inference) and occasional timed practice tests (to build comfort with the real format and pacing) covers both what a state test measures and how it's actually taken.
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