Share your test taking strategies with Guan Ai students!
Sara Lam | Posted on December 19th, 2008 in Integrative Rural Education Program, RCEF, Teaching. 
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Sigh! it’s that time of the year again. Final exams are just three weeks away and Guan Ai teachers have pulled out their secret weapon…… practice tests. Starting from about two weeks ago, various practice test vendors started visiting the school. They would come on their motorcycles, on which were bundled heaps and heaps of test papers that the teachers could come and buy for their students.
Exam fever!
Each book contains 12 practice tests and the teacher would dispense about one test every one or two days leading up to the exam. (They tell me that the top ranked school in the township goes through three books of tests for every subject!) The students spend two class periods completing one test, the teacher spends about one period going through the answers with them, and the process is repeated until exam week. One of our main goals this month is to work with teachers to come up with more strategic and effective methods for exam preparation.
How does exam preparation fit in with RCEF’s mission? First and foremost, RCEF is concerned with the genuine learning and development of students. If students genuinely understand the concepts, they should have no problem articulating and applying them and should perform well on tests. Therefore, the exam is one means of assessing how well we are doing our work. (It is only one of many means though. The exam focuses on a very narrow set of skills, and some questions are designed or graded in a way that does not accurately reflect students’ learning. Therefore, it is important that we supplement this with our own forms of assessment.) Exam preparation is also important because it is something that parents, teachers and principals use to evaluate success. We will not be able to get them to buy into our reform approaches if we do not produce decent test scores.
The first thing we did to prepare for the upcoming exams was analyze past exams. The Bureau of Education does not typically give exam papers back to schools after they have been scored, but were willing to give them to us after we made a special request. Through this analysis, we identified areas in which students could improve the most if given the right strategies. Next, we organized teacher meetings to talk about effective methods for preparing students for exams. For example, doing fewer practice tests and spending more time reteaching common problem areas, using different and more interesting review methods to keep students engaged etc. For the next few weeks, we will hold regular meetings to share good strategies for reinforcing certain concepts or tackling certain kinds of questions. Here are some strategies that the teachers have shared: Have students underline the keywords in the questions to make sure they read the questions carefully, if they really do not know the answer to reading comprehension questions just find the sentence in the passage that is similar to the question and copy either the sentence right before it or the one right behind it, always draw diagrams when solving geometry problems, etc.
What exam-taking strategies have worked well for you? Please share them with Guan Ai students!
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Songqiao says:
Added on December 22nd, 2008 at %I:%M %pI remember when I have to struggle for the exams in schools, I used a notebook to collect all the problems I did wrong in previous exams. I marked what I did and the correct answer, and reflected the entire solving process of the problems. Before exams, I usually just went over the problems on the notebook. However, the most important thing is still efficient learning throughout the school year rather than last minute test preparing. As long as all the necessary knowledge are mastered throughout the school year, the test should be easy.