PSSA: Test Taking Strats

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PSSA Test Taking Strats
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• Knowledge
• Application
• MOTIVATION
• Performance

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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)

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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).

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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 isnt punished.