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Test Taking Strategies

These are a list of test taking strategies that will be discussed with upperelementary students throughout the school year in helping them prepare for

state standardized testing.

Note Taking Skills and Strategies- What will be emphasized is the varioustypes of note taking such as strategic note taking and guided note taking.Strategic note taking focuses on describing, summarizing and listing main pointsof an idea. Guided note taking focuses on creating an outline of a story or generaltopic. Students will be informed the importance of note taking such as how theyaid student understanding of lecture information, and they serve as referencematerial for later study.

Study Skills Help and Tips- Learning how to memorize, concentrate, and use

effective study systems will be the focus of this lesson. It will also focus on howthe SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review) and the KWL (What IKnow, What I Want to Know, and What I Learned).

Breaking Tasks into Meaningful Chunks- Will focus on breaking up time tostudy each subject or topic one at a time. Also, students will be able tounderstand how to look for connections to categories such as compare/contrastand cause/effect.

Annotating Text- Highlighting and underlining text, circling definitions and

meanings, writing key words in the margin, writing symbols around where keywords can be found will be discussed.

Using Visual Organizers- Students will understand the visual representation offacts and ideas through charts, graphs, timelines, flow charts, and diagrams.They will know how it relates and applies to written text.

Critical Thinking Skills- the various types of critical thinking questions(Knowledge, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation) will be addressedfor students and how they can organize these questions visually to answer them.

Mnemonics (Memory Techniques) - Using acronyms (invention of acombination of letters), acrostics (an invented sentence), rhyme keys (creatingand memorizing key words that associate), loci method (imagine placing items invarious locations), image-name technique (invent the relationship with a nameand physical characteristic), and chaining (create a story to remember groups ofwords) will help students grasp a better understanding of memorization.

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Key Terms for State Standardized Testing

Achievement Test: A standardized test (usually multiple choice) that measurescontent-area knowledge (e.g., science, math, English, and social studies) andacademic skills.

Aptitude Test: A standardized, multiple-choice test that measures students'verbal and math reasoning abilities and is used by college admissionsdepartments to predict how well a student will perform in college.

Bell Curve: A graph representing test scores that shows the majority of studentsgrouped in the middle, with an equal number both below and above the average.

Criterion-Referencing: A scoring technique that shows a student's results incomparison to a benchmark or set standard of acceptable performance.

Norm-Referencing: A scoring technique that shows a student's results incomparison to a "norm" group of students. The norm group typically answersone half of all questions correctly.