You will want to teach your strugglers strategies for navigating difficulties on the test. In the beginning, it is helpful to teach them some strategies for tackling multiple-choice questions. Teach students to read each question and ask, “What does the question mean?”“What is it asking me to do?” You might want to create a game that helps stu- dents learn what predictable questions are asked on their test. Questions on the test fall into one of two categories. There are questions that ask the reader to think of the whole of the text and there are questions that ask them to think of a part, a line, or a detail. You might want to put questions in an envelope and on the outside of one side of it write “W” and on the other side write “D.” Students can dump out the questions and turn them over, and then take turns reading the questions and putting them under the “W” (think of the whole of the text) or “D” (think of a detail from the text).
Questions to include in the envelope:
You can also create the game, “Which one of these sentences doesn’t belong?” Students read through a series of test questions and find the ones that are asking them to do the same work as a test-taker in order to find the one that is different. For example:
■ What does the word ______ most likely mean? ■ Which word means about the same as ______? ■ In the first sentence, the word ______ means ______? ■ Why did the author most likely write this passage?
Whole-Text Question
• After reading the passage, what could the reader conclude?
• In the story, what is the character’s mainproblem? • This passage is mostlike a . . .
• Where does mostof the story take place? • The story is mainlyabout . . .
• What is this story mostlyabout?
• Why did the author most likelywrite this passage? • This passage is mostlyabout . . .
Detail Question
• What’s the mainproblem in the first paragraph? • Which phrase bestexplains how the character felt? • According to the passage, what happened right
before . . . ?
• What does this line mean?
It is wise to teach these youngsters to answer the question beforelooking at the choices, and then to look for the answer choice that best matches theirs. If a student is having trouble answering the question, teach him to think back over the story and retell it to himself. If this does not help, he must return to the story—but not to the beginning. Instead, he should think about the part of the story that corresponds to the question and return to that part, then reread and answer the question.
Often when novice or struggling test-takers have trouble with a question, they pick an answer they remember being in the story, and while not incorrect, it is not the best answer to the question. It is wise to teach your students that most of the answers will be found in the story and are not really wrong, but only one answers the question the best.
Among the first things you’ll want to make sure students know is that boldfaced words are very important, and to pay attention to them because they offer guidance about what to look for in the passages. For example, often test questions put words like “before” and “after” in bold.
To help students understand test language you may want to create games that they can play for ten to fifteen minutes a few times a week. One such game is Concentration. Cards are made with test language written on them and then students have to find the match that is a description of what the test-taker has to do. It might look like this:
The actual cards you use should reflect the words you’ve been using to talk about test language and types of questions.
You’ll want to teach your students the language of the test. We assume that stu- dents know what the phrases “mostly about,” “most likely,” and “most important” mean. You might find it necessary to make these terms concrete for your students by infusing them into your classroom’s daily life. You may even make collages of pictures from magazines that can be sorted a few different ways, for example, clothes, hair acces- sories, and winter accessories. Then you can ask your students what they think the col- lage is mostly about. Some students will look and sort and count that there are more clothes than anything else, and they’ll say this is mostly about clothes. But students with a more sophisticated sense of sorting into a concept will be able to see that most of the items fit under a broader category, like “things you wear.”
Right Before
Recall or look back in the text for what came directly in front of that sentence, part, or step.
Mostly About
Think about the whole text.
Best Describes
Words that tell you what kind of person someone is, based on that person’s actions
NOT
Refers to a statement that is not true about the text
Main Problem
Describe the biggest issue or challenge the character is facing.
Most Like
Identify the genre of the passage you read.
Most Likely
Based on what you read, what is the best expla- nation or meaning?
Right After
Recall or look back in the text for what came next.
Sequence words are used a lot on the third-grade test, and so you should weave these words through your daily classroom life as well. Ask students to look at today’s schedule and find out what they will be doing first, right beforelunch, and right afterreading work- shop. You may also ask students to line up for lunch by using sequence words.
Students are often asked in the listening section to identify opinions, and many teachers have found it easy to teach kids the words that commonly indicate opinion, such as best, most, greatest, worst, and very. To support students in understanding opin- ion statements, it is helpful to teach these outside of the test. It is important that stu- dents understand what an opinion statement sounds like because it isn’t necessary to understand the passage to be able to get this question correct. You may support stu- dents’ understanding of opinion statements by giving them a factual statement, like: “Today is Wednesday and we have PE at 10:00.” Next, you could ask students to gen- erate opinion statements about this fact. For example, “Wednesday is the best day of the week because we have PE.” Bringing test language into our students’ lives will demys- tify it and help kids gain confidence in their test-taking abilities. You may want to cre- ate a test-prep game that teaches into fact and opinion. You can create categories like baseball, movies, and New York, and in an envelope put opinion-and-fact statements. Students will sort these into fact-and-opinion piles by looking for the statements that contain opinion words. For example, in the category “movies,” students will read a sen- tence strip that has “It’s Complicatedwas the funniest movie of 2009,” and would then discuss whether this a fact or an opinion. They would put this in the opinion pile because it contains the opinion word “funniest.” But if they pulled the strip that said, “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a 3D movie,” they would put that into the fact pile because it doesn’t contain an opinion word.
You want to study what kinds of questions students are getting wrong and make up practice materials that work specifically with these kinds of questions. You’ll want to cre- ate questions that mimic those your students struggled with and have them practice in small groups during test prep. For instance, to support students on a difficult multiple- choice question, pull all of the students who answered B and invite them to discuss whyin a small-group setting. Ask, “What in the story made you choose B? Do you think it is the bestanswer?” Or, you can pull kids who chose B and C together and have a debate: “Remember, what is the best answer?” Main idea and true/false questions are very effective for this type of small-group work.
While students are reading the test you’ll move around and confer, assessing to understand what they are doing well and what they are struggling with as they read each genre, passage, and text level. When students are reading the passages, some things you might want to ask them are:
■ “Tell me how you’re making sure you understand what you’re reading.” ■ “Can you show me how you figured out what that part was about?” ■ “Explain to me what you’re doing to hold onto what you’re reading.”
When students are reading the questions and answering them with a partner or by themselves, you want to hear their process, noticing where they get derailed or what is working so you can teach into or compliment their work.
■ “What does that question mean?” ■ “What is the question asking you to do?” ■ “What do you think the answer is?”
■ “Can you think back and recall the information that answers that question?” ■ “If you can’t recall the information, where will you go to find it? Will you look
at the beginning, middle, or end of the text? How do you know?” ■ “How does what you are saying answer the question?”
■ “Could there be any other possible answers?” ■ “Is there a better answer?”
■ “Tell me how you decided that is the answer.”