PSSA: Test Taking Strats

• Knowledge• +• Application• +• MOTIVATION• =• Performance

• Students begin losing “efficiency” about 20 minutes into test taking.

• Frequent mental/ physical breaks which can be initiated by drinking water and/or eating a mint, etc can help to “reset” concentration.

• On the PSSA exams, multiple choice responses consist of the following:

• 1 slash and burn answer, which is clearly wrong.

• 2 responses which serve as distractors.• 1 correct answer.

• Distracters sometimes play on students’ tendencies not to read the entire question

• Distracters most often occur at choice “A”.• The next most likely distracter choice is “D”.• Therefore, in a true guessing scenario,

selecting either B or C will yield the best results.

• About 22% of questions missed result from students not reading the entire question.

• School districts who have eliminated answers misread due to improper erasing have seen scores increase by 17%

• (we need better erasers)

Open-Ended Responses

• Are graded in an average of forty-give seconds.

• Do not require complete sentences.

• May include bullets, numbers, quotations (even without quotes on them).

Open-Ended Responses

• Encourage students, even if writing in complete sentences, to label the parts of their answer.

• This helps the graders quickly identify that each part of the question has been answered.

• This generally results in higher scores.• Extra examples help: if two examples are

correct and a third is not, the student isn’t punished.