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Ten Tips for Improving Your Child’s Performance on the MAP Communication Arts Test The MAP test provides data to teachers to help improve instruction and target areas of need for your child(ren). For that reason, it’s important that your child(ren)’s test scores accurately depict their learning. Most of the tips found here are applicable to a variety of grades and may be adjusted to better fit individual situations. The following is an adaptation from Navigating the MAP: Communication Arts, a publication of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Curriculum Section. The 10 following tips were originally written to aid teachers. We’ve altered the language to accommodate parents. We hope you will find the information and suggestions in these ten tips useful as you work with your children. Tip #1: Read, read, read! One of the most surprising findings of research is how little reading students are actually doing. Reading, like any other skill, takes practice. Students don’t practice reading by doing worksheets; they practice reading by reading. Therefore, one of the best and simplest steps to improve the reading ability of children is to provide sustained periods of time for children to read. Tip #2: Help your child to read like a writer. One of the best ways to improve reading comprehension is to teach children to read from the point of view of the writer. Even in the early grades, students can begin to “get into the head” of the author. Thinking like a writer improves both the reading and writing ability of children. Tip #3: Read a variety of books and magazines. In the world outside of school, students need to be able to read a wide variety of texts, from road signs to restaurant menus, from comic books to classics, from tennis shoe ads to computer manuals. The MAP Communication Arts test contains short stories, poems, dialogues, magazines articles, charts and tables. To help your child become savvy in many reading situations, provide him with abundant and diverse reading opportunities. Tip #4: Build your child’s reading stamina. One of the main problems children face with reading, specifically reading multiple passages on a test, is they just give up. Reading tests usually employ a collection of passages of varying difficulty. Some of the passages will be below grade level; and still others will be above grade level. So the advice to “do the best you can” is probably appropriate. You may also help your child by: • Creating voices for the characters in books and then re-read the passages using these voices with exaggerated expression. • Re-reading passages aloud. • Keeping focused on the text by following along with a finger under the words. To build reading stamina, you may want to encourage your child to: • Gradually increase the amount of time he or she reads at one sitting. • Set individual reading goals. • Take short breaks, such as stretching or closing their eyes for a minute.
Tip #5: Teach your child that visuals are part of the text. Parents may teach children a broader view of the word “text.” On the MAP Communication Arts test, items sometimes require students to do more than just read the words in a passage. Students may need to gather information from photos, captions, drawings or charts and graphs. You can remind your child to look at all of these materials as part of the total text. Tip #6: Help your child know how to use text-based support in written responses. Most of the constructed-response items on the MAP Communication Arts test contain two parts. First, the student is asked a content question such as “What is the main idea of this passage?” or “Why is this an appropriate title for the story?” Second, the student is told to support his or her answers with detail and examples from the story. If students give answers to questions but do not support those answers adequately with specific details from the passage, they will receive only partial credit. This is the most common cause for the loss of points on the test. You can improve your child’s score simply by reiterating to your child to use specific details from the story. Tip #7: Teach your child to read the test questions first. While directions on most standardized communication arts tests, including the MAP Communication Arts test, tell students to read the passage first and then answer the questions that follow, classroom research has shown that many students do better if they read the items first, then return to read the passage (Calking 86-87). Reading the questions first gives students a purpose and direction for their reading. Reading in a testing situation is clearly different than reading for pleasure. Emphasize to your child that the purpose is to find answers to the specific questions being asked. Looking at the questions first simply makes more sense in a testing situation. Tip #8: Help your child find out how many test items they can hold in memory while reading a passage. Many elementary students will have trouble remembering more than two questions at a time. Even high school students probably will run into trouble if they try to remember more than four items at a time. Through practice, students can experiment until they find the best number for each of them individually to try to hold in mind while reading the test. Once students have identified their optimal number of questions to remember, they are ready to practice using tips #7 and #8 together. Tip #9: Teach your child to identify all parts of a question. Another test-taking skill you can teach your child is how to identify exactly what each question is asking. Some questions have multiple parts, and these parts are often combined into a single sentence with a single question mark at the end. Students should underline each question word (who, what, when, where, why, how, and any other word or phrase that indicates a question). By doing so, they can see if a question has multiple parts. Not answering all parts of a multi-part question is a common mistake on the MAP Communication Arts test. Tip #10: Teach your child to paraphrase test items, turning questions into statements. Another strategy that works well in combination with the tip above is teaching children to turn questions into statements. The child may underline the questions words as described above, then turn each part of the item into a statement. For example, the question “Why did the main character steal the ball?” could be rephrased as “The main character stole the ball because…..” This practice allows the child to phrase the question in a way that makes the most sense to him. He is then ready to read the passage and look for answers. Most of the above tips have been suggested by Missouri teachers, especially those who participated in the state rescoring of the MAP Communication Arts test in the summer of 1998. The other primary source is A Teacher’s Guide to Standardized Reading Tests, by Lucy Calkins, Kate Montgomery, and Donna Santman (Heinemann 1998). Both of these sources have been gold mines of practical ideas.
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