8th Grade Test Prep: How do I do well on the multiple choice section?

As we discussed in class today there are THREE main points to keep in mind about the multiple choice section AKA Book 1.

POINT 1: Use your brain to THINK WHILE YOU READ. Practice all of those reading strategies you've learned through the years (like visualizing, predicting, re-reading, and so on). This also includes noticing the clues in each passage that help you (like the directions, sidebars, the title, pictures, etc...).

POINT 2: The questions are the thing! We will teach you strategies to help you "translate" test questions, which are written in "super-English" into "normal English." If you do not know what the question is asking, you can't answer it, can you?

POINT 3: You must go back to the text to find evidence for your answers. Always. You must.

Other take-aways you noted today:

• Eliminating really bad answers from multiple choices improves our chances of choosing the right answer.
• Sometimes we just won't know what a word means in an answer choice. We can look carefully at the word to see if there is a smaller part of it we recognize or know. If that does not help, we can use the process of elimination to help us make a best guess.
• Some questions repeat a passage from the text and ask us to study them for what the author is doing. In these cases we have to check each answer choice to see if it makes sense.