Winning Strategies for Test Taking, Grades 3-8

A Practical Guide for Teaching Test Preparation

W. W. Denslow, Judy Cova Kelly, Kathleen Kryza

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781626366442
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Winning Strategies for Test Taking, Grades 3–8 provides a fun and engaging approach for developing effective test-taking skills in children. Chapters detail the coaching of test thinkers, test-reading strategies, and question–answer strategies.Using various examples, planning guides, and models, the authors explain how to effectively help students prepare for different test formats, including: Reading and analyzing texts
Multiple-choice questions
True-or-false questions
Writing from a promptThe assessments highlighted in this book will empower students with the ability to choose, to think creatively and critically, and to gain better social skills along the way.

1

Coaching
Test Thinkers

If nothing else, children should leave school with a sense that if they act, and act strategically, they can accomplish their goals.

—Peter Johnston (2004, p. 29)

GAME STRATEGY FOR TEACHERS

Understand That …

• When students see learning as relevant and meaningful to their lives, they are more likely to transfer the skills to other areas.

• Learners can develop the sense and skills needed to be effective learners and test takers when teachers teach metacognitively and teach for transfer.

• The skills learned in test taking can be transferred to other settings.

Know

• Transfer

• Metacognition

• Scaffold

• Explicit instruction

• Think-alouds

Able to Do

• Explicitly teach strategies

• Talk metacognitively about thinking as students engage with tests

• Show how a strategy transfers from this application to a new application

THE HEAD START

As early as late July, chain stores and office suppliers begin stacking their shelves with school supplies. Notebooks sell for 79¢ and pocket folders for 10¢. Crowds of wise shoppers stock up, but most of these shoppers are teachers buying school supplies for their own students. Some participate in fan-out calling. If anyone sees a great sale, the calling chain goes into action. They want to be prepared. They know the value of a head start because, by October, it is too late. Those same notebooks will cost $2.99, and pocket folders will cost 79¢.

Likewise, every teacher wants to get a head start on test preparation. The dates for the state-mandated tests or districtwide achievement tests are on school calendars along with teacher conferences and holiday breaks. Every building or district has its own plan for test preparation. Getting a focused and effective head start may be the most important part of that plan.

Look at the challenges facing one teacher and 28 students. It is the end of the first week of school. Shannon, a third-grade teacher, has already created a great classroom community, partially assessed the reading, writing, and math skills of each of her students, established her reading and writing routines, and now she has to prepare her students for the state tests, which are given in October. To complicate matters, by state mandate, Shannon has only the first 14 days of school to show students the test or talk about how to take it. By law, she cannot mention the test or have test-related artifacts on her classroom walls for the 10 days prior to the test. Now pause and imagine 28 third graders who are not quite ready to give up sunshine and grassy days of play. In addition, imagine the range of reading abilities, attention spans, and emotional temperaments in that classroom. How can she develop confident and competent learners and, eventually, test takers? How can she pull out a state test and tell her squirming youngsters that now it is time to learn how to take a test?

What Shannon chooses to do is focus her test preparation on a few effective test-taking strategies and explicitly teach them so her students can use the strategies with increasing confidence, competence, and independence. She will also teach across the year knowing that her third graders will take the same state test next October in fourth grade. Teaching for transfer and independence are at the top of Shannon’s planning list. Her plan is part of a grade-level plan that was designed by her building and is supported by her district.

If you are reading this book, you, like Shannon, are facing a state-mandated, high-stakes test at some point in your academic year. You are looking for solutions to the challenges you face as you prepare your students. You may be a single teacher or a group of colleagues in a book study. You may be a school improvement team looking for strategies and data to accomplish the goals in your strategic plan. In any case, you are ready to learn some powerful and meaningful ways to prepare students for taking tests.

THE TRUTH ABOUT TEST PREPARATION

Why do students study and prepare for tests? To get to the right answer! To pass the test! The more answers students get right, the higher the chance they will pass the test. However, students may not see it that simply. (We may not see it that simply either.) But that is what it is. Testing is the same as any game experience. When the buzzer rings at the end of the game, a score of 67–66 is still a winning score.

Some teachers might argue that it is not enough to just pass. And they would be right. It is not enough. These teachers see a score of 67–66 as barely winning, and it is barely winning, but it is winning. State tests connected to the No Child Left Behind Act put teachers and schools in a similar dilemma. They ask: How will I coach my struggling students to pass a test that is too difficult for them at this time in their educational lives? If your school or district needs to make annual yearly progress (AYP), passing is in the forefront of your mind. Quality teaching and learning form an effective strategy to ensure AYP; focused test preparation is their partner.

TIME-OUT

Examine Your Test: What challenges will your students encounter on your state test?

Jot down a list of challenges your students may face. How do these challenges become decisions for your test-preparation instruction? Add a list of ways you, your grade-level team, building, or district are addressing these challenges.

Your students can pass. Test-taking strategies empower all students. Confidence increases motivation to engage with a test. Increasing engagement can impact scores positively. In this way, passing a test is like playing a game, because it requires strategy and the determination to face each challenge as it emerges. James Paul Gee (2004) parallels decoding print to playing a game. He suggests that “A child or an adult is engaging in a ‘game’ whenever they are taking on a specific sort of identity defined by certain ‘moves’: that is, certain sorts of actions and interactions that define them as playing a certain sort of role” (p. 46). If we use this game metaphor, we understand as students take up the role of test taker, they are learning ways to act in the test setting and strategies to interact with the test. Test taking is not a game; it is serious business. But like a game, it has legal moves and effective strategies. Students can develop the skills and strategies they need to feel competent and confident and not give up. From this perspective, we remind students that tests provide a single snapshot of their abilities on a given day; they do not tell their whole story as learners. We also want to help them see that in learning to take tests they are developing an academic skill, but they are also gaining life knowledge and learning important procedures. Using the practices in this book, we can help students see a connection between the skills they learn in test taking and the skills they will need in life.

This chapter addresses some ideas and strategies to help you get started and to help you build a mindset for making test preparation an engaging and meaningful experience for your students as well as yourselves.

Students who enter the test-taking setting with prior knowledge of how the test works will score significantly higher than students who don’t know the test. So it’s important for teachers who are preparing students for these tests to have knowledge of the test, its parts, the various demands, and the expectations. Think of the test as a genre like poetry or a textbook. A reader who understands how stanzas and line breaks work will find poetry more accessible. Likewise, a reader who understands how the headings, subheadings, and other textbook features work will find a textbook more accessible. Like any genre, tests are written by test writers who adhere to the expectations of the test genre. If students know how the test genre works, they can take the test more effectively. It seems the best way to learn about tests is to become a student of the test, researching the test content, format, and types of questions or responses and applying strategies to manage these elements.

TEACHING FOR UNDERSTANDING

Teaching for independent performance may be at the heart of all teaching and learning, but it is the key to developing test sense. Here teachers preparing children for a test are like the coach who uses language in conscious ways to name the thinking, processes, techniques, and plans players will use when they are in the midst of the game and alone on the court. The coach knows the player needs his own internal voice to notice and name the action on court and make split-second decisions. Where does the player get this internal voice? The list is long: the coach, other experienced players, time-outs during the game, watching and discussing game videos, and studying professional players. The coach knows becoming an independent player requires learning how to notice and name the actions occurring in a game in order to quickly retrieve the strategies to manage the action. The coach teaches the strategies, but also the self-assessing moment. The goal is modeling and practicing in situations to build the internal voice. As a result, the player becomes adept at asking a series of questions that enable her response: What do I see? What am I expected to do? How is this like or different from other experiences? What strategy do I know to respond effectively? How will I use or adjust this strategy?

Less is more. Teaching for an effective internal voice requires focus. A focused test-preparation unit with a few instructional practices and a few explicit strategies will translate to test success. The essential instructional practices teachers need to use to develop metacognitive learning that transfer into an internal voice for test success are explicit instruction, scaffolding, modeling, and think-alouds.

Teaching for understanding and transfer is essential to prepare students for a test and to build confident performance in a test setting. In addition, teaching for understanding and transfer develops competent and confident learners who will apply prior learning to a variety of settings and contexts in school and in life. Learning with understanding engages students in active learning, encourages transfer of knowledge, and empowers students.

TIME-OUT

Examine Your Test: How is the test organized and scored?

Take the test yourself. Become knowledgeable about how the test is constructed and how it is scored. Identify the parts of the test, the numbers and types of questions, and how those questions will be scored. For example, the writing portions of a test will be scored by an adult reader who is looking for specific traits of writing and specific kinds of evidence of thinking. In Chapters 4 and 5, we show you how to study those traits and have students practice test writing, which is its own unique genre of writing.

Studying and analyzing the test with colleagues before you study the test with your students will direct and focus your teaching.

Transfer

Transfer occurs when students consciously use the strategies and skills they have learned in one setting to perform a task in a new setting. This sounds simple, and it might be for many physical and procedural tasks. If someone shows you how to hit a softball, most likely you can transfer that physical knowledge to hitting a baseball. The ball size and the speed of the pitch may make the task a bit harder, but the task is essentially the same, so you are able to transfer the skill. The National Research Council (2000) lists factors that enable the transfer of learning. To make test preparation effective, keep in mind a few key factors: learning is an active process focused on understanding; memorizing facts and “one-shot” exposures to information does not promote transfer; knowing “when, where, why and how to use knowledge” is essential to solving problems; and deliberate monitoring during practice develops evaluation of current understanding in order to develop flexible and adaptive use (p. 236).

Think about your own reading. As effective readers, you transfer knowledge every time you pick up a text. You integrate a complex series of skills and strategies to engage with the text. For example, you probably scan the text and identify the genre. If it is a science textbook, you know that textbook is harder to read because it is written in a formal style and contains difficult and technical vocabulary. You know to slow down and reread this kind of text. You know that the author will put this vocabulary in boldface and the definition of these boldfaced words will be in the paragraph. You also know tex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Titlepage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• 1 Coaching Test Thinkers
• 2 Test-Reading Strategies
• 3 Question-Answering Strategies
• 4 Constructed Response Questions
• 5 Writing to a Prompt
• 6 Preparing to Use This Unit of Study
• References
• Index