Taking an hours-long reading test is unlikely to be the highlight of any middle school student’s day, but we must prepare our students for it. I’ve written a lot about these tests and how to prepare students for them, but I haven’t actually written about specific test-taking strategies to give your students. These general ELA test-taking strategies for middle school should be reviewed regularly with your students in the weeks leading up to the big test.
The goal is to read and comprehend every passage.
In the past, I’ve had students who told me they just skimmed the passages looking for the answer on their EOGs, and unsurprisingly, their scores didn’t reflect their reading ability. Encourage your students to read every word of every passage. Consider telling students to underline the sentence in each paragraph that best summarizes the paragraph or the main idea and encourage them to write down the main idea or a summary of the passage before they move on to the questions. Encouraging your students to make sure they understand the entire passage means they are more likely to think critically about what they’ve read to synthesize it instead of just answering questions in isolation. Like what you see here? Join my mailing list for tips, tricks, new products, and more!
Time management is critical during the test.
Our state allows students several hours to take the test, but students must be mindful of the time to make sure they don’t panic and also to make sure they don’t burn out. Some of the questions on the test will be quick and easy to answer, while others will be far more challenging. I always tell my students to skip questions stumping them and return to them later. I tell them to make a small mark on the answer sheet or write the question number down on the scratch paper so they don’t forget to return to it. Sometimes returning to the question after some time will help them think of the correct answer. Even if that isn’t the case, skipping the trickier questions and returning to them later allows students to answer the remaining questions while they have more energy.
The process of elimination is a critically important test-taking strategy for middle school ELA.
Even your strongest readers will likely encounter questions to which they don’t know the answer, so taking the time to help them understand how to eliminate wrong answers will benefit everyone. Your students may have to guess on some questions, but they will be doing themselves a favor if they take the time to eliminate answers that they know are wrong or that do not make sense.
Making sure that your students are well prepared for end-of-year or state tests can feel very daunting. My test prep reading passages contain engaging passages with questions designed to be similar to what they will encounter on high-stakes tests. These passages are an easy way to help provide your students with meaningful practice during test prep!
