Many students feel that school is a breeze in the early years of their academic careers. They fly through their homework, ace their class tests, and manage to maintain stellar grades with minimal effort. Yet as students progress through school, the testing demands rise quickly, and it becomes increasingly challenging to rely on their natural-born intelligence as a sole driver of academic success. Help your child improve his test taking skills and learn to ace true false, multiple choice, and essays exams with the strategies detailed below.

True/False

Many teachers include a significant number of true/false questions as part of their self-created tests. While students may prefer this type of exam question, thinking the odds of answering correctly are in their favor, these questions are not always simple or straightforward. In fact, several strategies can help students answer true/false questions correctly:

-True/False Strategy 1: Turn the true/false statement into a question. If your answer is “yes” then the test question is probably true. If your answer is no, then the test question is probably false.

For example: Grocery stores sell fruit.

We can turn this statement into a question: Do grocery stores sell fruit? Since the answer is yes, this test question is probably true.

-True/False Strategy 2: The ‎entire statement must be true in order for the answer to be true.

For example: You can eat pasta with a fork but you cannot eat chicken with your fingers.

The first past of this statement is true (you can eat pasta with a fork) but the second part is false, since you can eat chicken with your fingers! Thus, the answer is false.

-True/False Strategy 3: Learn true/false “clue words” to help you choose the correct answer. “Soft” clue words, including often, probably, sometimes, might, may, or frequently, indicate that the answer is probably true. “Hard” clue words, including no, never, none, always, all, or every, indicate that the answer is probably false.

For example: People often make mistakes.

Often is a soft clue word. In this case, the answer is true.

Multiple Choice

As students move through school, they will encounter multiple choice questions on both in-class exams and just about every standardized test that they will take. Learning specific strategies for how to best tackle them can be helpful for years to come.

Multiple Choice Strategy 1: Eliminate “oddballs,” or answers that seem different from the other choices.

For example: _______ is a summer month.

a) November
b) February
c) July
D) The Beach

Clearly choice D (The Beach)‎ is not even a month and is therefore the “oddball,” so the student would eliminate that choice.

Multiple Choice Strategy 2: Answer the question in your head before looking at the choices.

For example: A ___ is used to open cans.

a) Knife sharpener
b) Can opener
c) Ice cream scooper
d) Serving spoon

Before looking at the choices, the student should determine in her mind that can opener is probably the right answer in this case, then look for the correct choice.

Multiple Choice Strategy 3: Underline key words while reading the question. Certain words give clues to the correct answer, such as except, only, not, never, best, or cannot.

For example: All of the following are sports except:

A) Hockey
B) Soccer
C) Studying
D) Rugby

In this case, it is important for the student to read the word except, or incorrect answers may be selected.

Essays 

In-class exams and standardized tests often require students to write an essay, frequently based on a prompt, like:  “Compare and contrast living in the country and living in the city” or “Persuade your friend to choose basketball as a sport over soccer.”

Encourage your child to try some of these strategies when answering essay tests:

Essay Strategy 1: Underline the directive, which explains how to answer the prompt. Directives include words such as examine, analyze, compare, contrast, discuss, and persuade. Then rewrite the prompt in your own words to ensure that y‎ou understand what the tester is asking.

Essay Strategy 2: Create a brainstorm web for your essay. Make sure you include your thesis statement in the web, which sets the plan for your essay and should be the last sentence of your introduction paragraph.

Essay Strategy 3: Self-check your essay! Try the CTOPS checklist for self-checking, which stands for Capitalization, Tense (consistent past or present tense), Organization, Punctuation, and Spelling.

As your child moves through school, she will encounter increasingly complex tests. Encourage her to try these strategies and she will be well on her way to acing all types of exams.

The post Best Test Taking Strategies for Students appeared first on EBL Coaching.

As final exams approach, help the kids manage stress with these tricks from a local education expert: The night before an exam, many students feel “sick”–their head is aching, their stomach hurts, their back is sore. Others feel angry, or possibly even depressed. Some are irritable and others lose focus. While these symptoms might seem like ones that need medical attention, they may just be implications of test anxiety–especially if a big exam is looming. Try some of the strategies below to reduce your child’s anxiety and help her feel relaxed, prepared, and positive come test day.

‎1) Deep breathing exercises: When we feel anxious, our breathing often moves from deep abdominal breathing to shallow chest breathing. Help your child relax and breathe deeply to reduce anxiety before an exam with the following exercise:

Have your child lay down or sit in a comfortable spot with his eyes closed. Tell him to focus on his breathing, and rest his hands on his stomach to feel his breath move up and down. Have your child count backwards from 10 (or another number of your choosing) in the following manner: he inhales deeply while saying the number “ten.” He then exhales while saying out loud “relax.” Then he inhales again deeply and says “nine,” and exhales while saying “relax.” He continues to follow this pattern until he reaches zero. As he performs this exercise, his breathing should move from shallow chest breathing to deeper abdominal breathing, helping him to relax and reduce his anxiety before an exam.

2) Journaling:  Encourage your child write in a journal about her test worries. On the morning of the exam, have her sit in a quiet room free of distractions and write about her worries and concerns for 10 minutes. She can even decorate her journal with colors or stickers to make it feel comforting and familiar. A University of Chicago Study found that this type of journaling can help students reduce their anxiety and improve their overall performance on exams.

3) Memory strategies: Remind your child to use memory strategies when preparing for exams, including acronyms, checklists, and other mnemonics. For example, he can also use an acronym such as PEMDAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) to remember the sequence in solving math equations: Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. Likewise, when learning the planets, your child can create a silly sentence such as “My very eager mom jumped straight up near Paris!” to represent Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. As soon as he is given his test, he should write down the acronyms‎ and/or other mnemonics that he memorized.

4) Rewards: Give your child a reward to look forward to once the exam is over, whether it’s a movie, dinner out at her favorite restaurant, an ice cream date, or a similar treat. Providing your child with something exciting to look forward to can help her stay calm and positive.

5) During the exam, encourage your child to use test-taking strategies. For instance, she should answer the easiest questions first and determine an allotted amount of time to spend on each question. For multiple choice questions, she should read the question in its entirety before looking at the answer choices, try to answer the question in her mind before looking at the choices, and cross out answers she knows are incorrect. For essay exams, she should map out a schedule, carefully look at the directive words when reading the question, and create an outline before beginning to write.

Taking tests–whether standardized or in-class–can be daunting for many students. By teaching your child strategies and encouraging him to use these strategies on a regular basis, he will learn to relax, stay confident, and improve his overall performance on exams.

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If you answered NO to any of these questions, then, chances are, your child lacks effective studying, reading comprehension, test taking, or writing strategies—strategies which are critical to school success. This lack of effective strategies often leads to frustration, poor grades, weak motivation, and a dwindling self-esteem.

The following is a reading comprehension and study skills technique, one of the many strategies that are important for giving your child an edge in understanding material, studying for tests, attacking text books, and taking notes. It is a strategy that is used by some of the most successful students.

The PPORA method has been proven to strengthen reading comprehension and study skills. The acronym stands for Preview, Post-it, Organize, Review, & Answer.

The PPORA method

Preview — read all headings, sub-headings, picture captions, bold words, and questions to get an overall picture of what you’re about to read. This will prepare you for what is to come.

Post-it — read each paragraph. At the end of each paragraph, stop and describe in your own words what it was about. Then, using small-size Post-it notes, write 2-3 words which summarize what the paragraph is about. Place these Post-it notes on the margins next to the text.

Organize — After you have written Post-it notes for the entire section, create a graphic organizer using the information on the Post-its. There are many types of graphic organizers. You should choose one that best suits your learning modality. A visual learner, for example, would probably benefit from a spider-like organizer. To create this type of organizer, write the main idea of the section in a circle in the center of the page. Next, create “legs” containing the text from each Post-it note. Underneath those legs, list bullet points of the important details, in your own words, from the text.

Review — Review the information on the graphic organizer, including the main points and supporting details.

Answer — Answer the questions that are given at the end of the section. By this point, the answers should be a piece of cake!

I have seen students comprehension abilities improve many-fold using this technique, in just a short time period! It is one of the many structured and systematic techniques that are crucial components of academic success.

The post Effective Study Skills and Strategies for School Success appeared first on EBL Coaching.

For many fourth grade students, the thought of enduring a three-day-long statewide math exam gives them more jitters than a trip to the dentist. Most would rather wash dishes every night than endure this dreaded test. Yet for any fourth grade student attending a New York public school, this test is mandatory.

The right test taking strategies, however, can help put this anxiety to rest.

The New York State Fourth Grade Mathematics exam, given over a three-day period from March 6-8, helps determine whether students are meeting grade level learning standards. The test consists of three types of questions: multiple choice, short open-ended, and long open-ended. These questions are designed to test students’ content abilities and thinking skills.

To perform well on this exam, students should become comfortable with the format of this test and the different types of questions that may be asked. They can then learn strategies for how to best solve each of these kinds of questions. In particular, students may see the following problems on the test: Representation, Communication, Reasoning and Proof, and Problem Solving.

Representation

Representation problems typically involve pictures, charts, graphs, figures, or patterns. They ask students to create a drawing to describe a mathematical concept or to choose a drawing from a series of choices which best represents a given concept. To best solve these problems, students must learn to identify key words. Certain key words, such as “draw”, “create”, “label”, and “shade”, help students identify Representation problems. An example may be as follows:

Jack’s garden is a rectangle that is 40 feet long and 65 feet wide. Draw a rectangle to represent the garden. Label the length of each side.

The student should underline the word draw, since that is the key word which indicates that this problem requires the student to draw a representation of the figure.

Communication

Communication problems ask students to communicate an idea or concept. They may ask a student to explain how they came up with an answer or why their answer must be true. Students may be asked to express a mathematical concept in their own words using proper mathematical terminology. To develop proficiency with these types of problems, students should practice communicating mathematical ideas in their own words prior to the test. A sample problem may be as follows:

Two lines are perpendicular. What must be true about them?

To properly answer this question, students must be able to express the definition of perpendicular lines in their own words and relay the properties associated with this mathematical concept. The more practice expressing different concepts, the easier these questions will be.

Reasoning and Proof

Reasoning and Proof problems involve logical thinking. Students must use reasoning skills to prove whether a given statement is true or false. For example:

Richard makes 24 pounds of peanut brittle. He decides to put an equal amount of brittle into 5 boxes. He thinks each box will hold 5 pounds. Is his estimation reasonable? Explain why or why not.

A good strategy for answering Reasoning and Proof questions is to begin with a general statement. This statement should briefly describe the answer, such as “Richard’s estimation is reasonable.” Next, students should provide evidence of their answer. For example, “24 rounds up to 25, and 25 divided by 5 is 5. Thus, Richard’s estimation is likely to be true.” Parents can give students sample questions like this one and can replace the numbers in each problem for extra practice.

Problem Solving

Problem Solving questions ask students to analyze a scenario and come up with a solution. They involve more than just recalling a concept or crunching numbers. Rather, students must think, plan, and solve. Specifically, students should use the ORAS strategy, as detailed below:

Operation: Students should decide if the problem requires a specific operation or a combination of a few operations. For example, the problem may require addition, multiplication, or both. Students should indicate the relevant operation(s) with the proper symbol(s).

Relevant Information: Students should underline any numbers that are relevant to solving the problem. They should also cross out any numbers that are irrelevant to solving the problem.

Arithmetic Sentence: Students should create an arithmetic sentence that can be used to solve the problem.

Solution Sentence: Students should come up with a solution to the problem as a full sentence in their minds.

For example:

Lisa and her two friends went to a candy store. The price of gummy bears was $3 per pound, the price of chocolate squares was $5 per pound, and the price of butterscotch candies was $2.50 per pound. Each of them wanted two pounds of gummy bears and two pounds of chocolate squares. In total, they had $50. How much money did they have left over for drinks after purchasing their candy?

Students should use the ORAS strategy detailed above to solve this problem. They should make sure to cross out the $2.50, a number that is irrelevant to solving the problem. Parents can create similar problems to the one detailed above and create four lines underneath each problem for each step in the ORAS strategy, so that students can practice problem solving at home.

The fourth grade mathematics test can indeed cause anxiety and lead to sleepless nights. Yet the right strategies and lots of practice can help ease these fears and make the test day more welcoming.

The post Get Ready for the 4th Grade NYC Math Test! appeared first on EBL Coaching.

Taking end-of-the-year exams can be one of the most daunting aspects of school. Many students lose well-needed sleep and cringe at the thought of the big test day arriving. By learning some helpful test taking strategies, students can improve their performance on these exams, while helping to strengthen their overall study skills.

Column-Style Study Guides

Learning large quantities of information can be overwhelming for many students, especially when it comes from densely written texts. A helpful strategy for learning this information is to create column-style notes to serve as study guides. Say, for instance, a student needs to learn a text book section about Word War I. He or she should first read that section one sub-section at a time before taking any notes. The student should highlight the main idea of each section in green, or if there is no explicit main idea written in the text, he or she should write an implicit main idea in the margin and highlight that in green. The student should then highlight the important details in yellow, trying to only highlight information that is very important and only words and phrases whenever possible. One the student has finished reading the section, he or she should create a column-style diagram which might look as follows:

Topic: World War I

On the top of the page, the student should write the topic of the section; in this case, World War I. The main idea of each sub-section should be written in the column on the left in his or her own words (Causes of the War, Battles, etc), and the important details from each sub-section should be written in the column on the right. Note that for the important details students can feel free to use abbreviations, symbols, contractions, or any form of shorthand that they find helpful. Students should use this strategy for each section of text that they are required to learn. With this technique, they are able to “chunk” information that was once overwhelming into smaller, easier-to-understand, bits of text.

Memorizing Terms

Students are often required to memorize large quantities of vocabulary words or terms. Without having a photographic memory, this process can be tough. The three-tier note card strategy can be a helpful tool for learning these words and terms. The trick is to write the word or term on the front of the card and then create three horizontal columns on the back of the card, as follows:

The student should write the definition on the top part of the back of the card, in his or her own words. In the second (middle) section, the student should write a sentence with an association to something in his or her life. In the bottom section, the student should draw a picture annotating the sentence. For example, if the vocabulary word to be learned is digress, the student would write that word on the front of the card. On the top section of the back of the card, he or she might write “to stray or deviate.” In the middle section, he or she might write the following sentence: Every time my friend Sally tries to tell a story, she digresses from the main point. In the bottom section, he or she might draw a picture of Sally with a bubble coming out of her mouth with “blah, blah, blah” written inside the bubbles. With this strategy, students learn to link random vocabulary words and terms to various people and events in their lives.

Students should try to avoid cramming these strategies a day or two before the exam. To ease anxiety, they should start applying these strategies well in advance of the test day. By using these techniques they can become active, rather than passive learners, and help prepare themselves not only for one particular exam but for all future exams (and there will be many!) to come.

Dr. Emily Levy is the Founder and Director of EBL Coaching, which offers one-on-one tutoring and intensive summer programs. For more information, visit www.eblcoaching.com or call 212-249-0147.

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