Praxis II Test

February 25, 2005 9:20 AM

Praxis II -- Subject Assessment in English. I will be helping my sister study for this test this weekend. I'm looking for hints/tips/methods for helping someone study for a standardized exam. General advice welcome, but if you have information specific to this exam, even better.

She has previously failed this exam and if she doesn't pass this time, she will lose her job. Obviously, test anxiety will be a factor. Specific test info here.

posted by Otis to Education (2 answers total)

Best answer: I've helped people study for this exam (when I was in Teach For America in the 1990s). If I were you, I'd reassure your sister first of all that much of the content that you need is in the text of the questions-- even if something looks unfamiliar, it's often easy to figure out the correct answer. She should be able to use this technique to answer enough questions to score a passing grade. Tell her not to panic about the questions that she has no idea how to answer-- there ought to be few of those. It's designed to be a pretty straightforward test. Also, the questions about teaching methods are almost always very easy to figure out, so she should count those as free points and use them to her advantage.

My impression is that a lot of people do badly on this exam when they see that they'll be tested on identifying works of literature that they may or may not have read, and then they collapse when they see a few of these questions in the test. Generally, these questions are both rare and tend to focus on MAJOR works, so just go into the exam knowing that it's much more about reading comprehension than anything else. That ought to help at least a little.
posted by yellowcandy at 1:39 AM on February 26, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks for the reply yellowcandy.
posted by Otis at 5:00 PM on February 26, 2005