1. Welcome to Test Taking Strategies!
Being Test Wise

2. Session Objectives How to avoid test anxiety. Healthy eating.
Common traps children encounter.
Test Taking Strategies

3. Avoid Test Anxiety BEFORE THE TEST:
It's good to be concerned about taking a test. It's not good to get "test anxiety." This is excessive worry about doing well on a test and it can mean disaster for a student.
BEFORE THE TEST:
Reassure your child that they have been prepared for the test, and they know what to expect.
Get a good night's sleep. Rest, exercise, and eating well are as important to test-taking as they are to other schoolwork.

4. Avoid Test Anxiety DURING THE TEST:
It does not help to tell the child to relax, to think about something else, or stop worrying. But there are ways to reduce test anxiety. Encourage your child to do these things:
DURING THE TEST:
Read the directions carefully when the teacher hands out the test. If you don't understand them, ask the teacher to explain.
If you don't know the answer to a question, skip it and go on. Don't waste time worrying about it. Mark it so you can identify it as unanswered. If you have time at the end of the exam, return to the unanswered question(s).

5. DURING THE TEST: Budget your test taking time.
Change positions to help you relax.
Don't panic when students start finishing in their tests. There's no reward for being the first done.
Take slow, deep breaths.
Realize that you have done, and are doing, your best.

6. Healthy Eating
List some healthy foods onto the whiteboard.

7. Why do we need to eat healthy foods, especially for test taking?
Healthy Eating
Why do we need to eat healthy foods, especially for test taking?
Brain Food
Eggs
Bacon
Peanut Butter
Cheese
Yogurt
Protein is the preferred fuel of the brain. It also burns longer than carbohydrates, such as breads, donuts, and chips. Protein helps one to avoid mid-morning fatigue. If students are hungry, that becomes the focus of their attention.

8. Common Traps
Losing ones place in the passage when pausing to circle an answer or mark notes
Skipping over important directions
Being inattentive to graphics and pictures
Responding to test passages in the same way as to novels read for pleasure
Progressing out of order when bubbling answer sheet

9. Common Traps
Relying on memory for details in the passage and never checking back with the passage to confirm
Over-relying on background knowledge to answer questions
Consuming too much time to confirm answers in passages
Jumping from passage to passage so quickly that content becomes mixed or confused
Being overly perfect

10. Before Reading Strategies
The test is on your desk.
What do you do now?
Lesson Notes:
Ask students what they do when they are given a test and told to begin. Discuss some student generated ideas before going on to the next slide of suggested activities.

11. Get Ready be reading: fiction, non-fiction, or poetry.
Look over the test.
Think of it as several small jobs, not one big one. If you have a positive attitude you will do well.
Decide what kind of selections you will
be reading: fiction, non-fiction, or poetry.
Lesson Notes:
Bullet 1: Discuss with the students how looking at the length of the test is often frustrating and may create a negative attitude. Instead, they should think of it as preparing for a challenge; an opportunity to show off what they know.
Bullet 2: The test is already divided into parts. Students have the time to take a minute between passages to take a few deep breaths, to stretch in their seats, and to clear their minds.
Now look at the questions.

12. Scavenger Hunt Also highlight unusual or very specific
Read the questions before you read the passage. Don’t read the answer choices because it will take too long and confuse you later.
In each question, highlight the
important words that tell you what the
question wants you to do. It might ask
“main idea,” “compare,” “author’s
purpose,“ “opinion,” “summarize,” etc.
Lesson Notes:
Bullet 1: This strategy uses short term memory. You may want to use the example of remembering a phone number for a short period of time. What students highlight or underline should be held in this way; therefore, the activity needs to be short and quick to be effective. Otherwise students will be attempting to hold too much information for too long.
Bullet 2: The use of highlighters is highly encouraged.
Also highlight unusual or very specific
words or phrases that you can look for
while you’re reading.

13. During Reading Strategies
Lesson Notes:
Ask students to turn their papers over and try to remember as many words as possible that they highlighted. After completing this activity, have students quickly look over their highlighting.
Before turning to the passage, remind students that they have not yet read the passage. Everything to this point has been in preparation for reading.

14. Active Reading Strategies
Always read anything that may be written in a box at the top or bottom of the page. Hint: Sometimes you will find an answer to a question in one of the boxes.
Read in chunks, stopping often (every paragraph or 2) to ask yourself, “What did I just learn?”
If you don’t know, REREAD THE SECTION until you do. This way you’ll catch where you stopped understanding, instead of realizing at the end of the story that you don’t understand it.
Lesson Notes:
Bullet 2: You may want to have students share experiences with having read a large chunk of material and not knowing what they read. Stopping to restate, and reread if necessary, will prevent having to reread a large amount of text.
Bullet 3: It’s also important for students to reread when they don’t understand, because they may miss something important in the story if they don’t reread.

15. Highlighting Careful highlighting can help you find the answers to
the questions.
As you read, highlight any words that remind you of
the questions that you read.
As you read, highlight any sentence that contains
the unusual words or important words that you highlighted
in the questions.
Lesson Notes:
Bullet 1: The biggest distinction to make for students is that they highlight for
different purposes. When they highlight for a multiple choice test, they should
not highlight what they think is important; they should highlight what they
know relates to the previewed questions.
Be careful: Too much highlighting will make it hard for you to find the answers to the questions.

16. Highlight as little as possible. This is for short-term memory support
key operative words (eligible content words)
odd words that they might recall again when they see them in the passage such as the name Sara Jackson Milford.
Locations (in the 3rd paragraph, at the end of the story, etc)
Suggested Instructional Methods:
You may wish to do this as a whole group or model a few then let students work independently, pair share and share with whole class discussion

17. After Reading Strategies

18. Hints for Answering Multiple Choice Questions
Go back to the passage
Cover the answer choices
Get rid of wrong answers
Intelligent guessing
Advice for bubbling
Finishing
Lesson Notes:
These are the strategies that will be elaborated upon in subsequent slides.
As you discuss each strategy, remind students that as a general rule they are always expected to read all the answers in order to choose the BEST answer. Since some questions may have all true answer choices, it’s important that students do not stop reading if the first answer is correct; it may not be the best correct answer.
Not all strategies work for all questions. This is why it is important for students to be familiar with a variety of strategies, so that if one doesn’t work they can try another. This also supports different learning styles.

19. your highlighting will help you.
First of all...
Don’t trust your memory; go back to the passage to look for the answers.
It’s not cheating; you
have the time, and
your highlighting will help you.
Lesson Notes:
Remind students that all of the answers, or clues to the answers if the questions are inferential, are in the text. If they go back to look at the selection and their highlighting, their chance of choosing the correct answers is greatly improved.

20. Pretend It’s Not Multiple Choice
Cover up the answer choices and read the question only. See if you already KNOW the answer. Don’t peek, and predict the answer.
Now, read ALL of the answer choices.
See if any of the choices match your prediction.
If your prediction isn’t one of the choices, read the question again; you may have read it incorrectly or misunderstood it.
Double check your answer by going back to the passage for proof.
Lesson Notes:
You might want to begin discussion of this strategy with an analogy: think of the answer choices as a menu. If you’re hungry and go into a restaurant not knowing what you want, everything on the menu starts to look good. If you go in with an idea of what you want, then making your selection is much easier. If you know what you want before you look at the answer choices (menu), it makes the correct answer more obvious, increases your confidence, and saves time.
Discuss each bullet with your students.

21. Get Rid of Wrong Answers
Go back to the section in the passage that is
about the question.
Read ALL of the answers, and cross out those that
you KNOW are wrong.
If more than one choice seems true, then one of them doesn’t really answer that question. Read the question again to see which choice is wrong.
Some answers are partly true. If any part of
the answer is false, it’s not the correct answer.
Lesson Notes:
In the sample, reread aloud the section of the passage that relates to the question, then verbalize your thinking process as you eliminate distracters following the guidelines above.
For vocabulary, try putting each answer choice in the
sentence in place of the vocabulary word. Choose the
one that makes the most sense.
Ask yourself what the question is asking you to do.

22. I’ve Tried All That And Still Don’t Have A Clue
Research shows that first thoughts are
often correct, but we don’t always trust
ourselves.
If you cannot figure out the answer within a few minutes by using the passage and suggestions, go with your first thoughts. Don’t leave it blank; you might number the rest of the test incorrectly.
Lesson Notes:
You may want to tell students that studies suggest that our “gut feeling” may be information that our brain has retained without us realizing it.
Ask how many students have changed an answer, only to discover later that their first choice was correct.
Circle the questions you’re unsure of,
even though you’ve answered them. Go
back when you’re done with the section
and take a fresh look. Sometimes,
later questions help to answer earlier
ones.

23. Bubbling Advice
A dull pencil works best; it’s faster and does not snap off or tear the paper.
DO NOT press too hard; you might not be able to erase an answer completely if it’s too dark.
Make sure that the center of the bubble is filled in so the machine can score your answer.
Erase all stray marks and smudges. The machine may read them as answers.
Lesson Notes:
Discuss the bulleted notes.

24. When you are finished:
Go back to make sure that you’ve answered all of the questions.
Erase all stray marks and smudges.
Lesson Notes:
Discuss the points above.

25. List something you learned today…