STR Exam

A kindergarten teacher meets with individual students and asks them to point to the words in the text of a familiar nursery rhyme as the teacher and student read the nursery rhyme aloud together. Some students demonstrate understanding of the directionality of print by sweeping their finger as they "read," but they are not able to accurately point to the individual words. Other students who readily associate letters with sounds use this understanding to guide their finger as they point to a word that starts with the sound they hear at the beginning of the spoken word. The second group of students clearly try to match their speech to the print as they say the words. The teacher can best use the results of this informal assessment to determine which students are able to:

apply key concepts related to the alphabetic principle.

Which of the following sets of words would be most appropriate to categorize as Tier Two words?

arrange, observe, predict

A kindergarten teacher would like to determine if students can make inferences about characters and/or events in stories they hear or read. Which of the following assessment approaches is most likely to require students to make inferences?

asking students to use evidence from the text and illustrations to explain how a character feels and why the character feels that way

A prekindergarten teacher frequently reads aloud high-quality literature to develop children's familiarity with literary texts. Which of the following accompanying activities would best promote the children's understanding of basic story structure?

giving the children picture cards of events in the story to retell in sequence

Given the information provided, which of the following instructional plans would likely be most effective in improving this student's ability to self-monitor and self-correct while reading?

grouping the student with other students who are struggling with self-correcting and then explicitly reteaching skills involved in the process

. Several students in a first-grade class have progressed from the partial-alphabetic phase of word-reading development to the full-alphabetic phase. Which of the following instructional activities would be most appropriate for promoting these students' word-reading accuracy and automaticity?

having the students practice reading simple closed-syllable words in isolation and in decodable texts

A second-grade teacher is working with students to develop their automaticity in recognizing high-frequency words. Several English learners often misread or omit high-frequency prepositions (e.g., in, on, of, by) when reading connected text. Which of the following strategies for differentiating instruction for the English learners would best scaffold their learning in order to promote their accuracy and automaticity in reading high-frequency, grade-level function words?

having the students practice reading the target words in meaningful phrases that are illustrated to reinforce understanding

A third-grade teacher would like to model how to apply metacognitive strategies while reading in order to improve students' reading comprehension. Which of the following strategies would be most appropriate to model?

making predictions and self-questioning while reading

A first-grade teacher often uses a simple timeline graphic organizer to scaffold information for students when they are reading social studies texts about historical events or the lives of important people. The teacher's practice is most likely to promote students' development of which of the following disciplinary-literacy skills?

recognizing text structures commonly used in social studies

Students in a second-grade class will be reading a complex informational text about ants as part of a science unit focused on comparing the ways living organisms depend on one another. Prior to the reading, the teacher plans to show students a video depicting activities in ant colonies and to share a picture book about ants. The teacher's actions best demonstrate understanding of which of the following factors affecting reading comprehension?

the role of background knowledge

The extension of the activity best demonstrates the teacher's understanding of which of the following key factors affecting vocabulary development in prekindergarten children?

the role of families in supporting and reinforcing young children's vocabulary development

The teacher would like to reinforce this lesson while also promoting the students' knowledge of independent word-learning strategies. The teacher could best address both goals by showing the students how to

use print and/or digital resources to search for more synonyms and antonyms of a target word

Given this retelling, the teacher could best improve the student's ability to summarize the story in a way that conveys story relationships by providing explicit instruction in which of the following skills?

using causal conjunctions to connect the various events in the story in a logical manner

To promote students' ability to engage in academic conversations about informational texts, a second-grade teacher creates the following anchor chart with students. The teacher posts it in the classroom and supports students in using it during discussions. For example, ... The author said ... According to the author, ... From the reading I know that ...

. using textual evidence to support claims

Assest-based approach to reading instruction

Focuses on what children know rather than what they do not know

.A third-grade class includes several English learners who represent a variety of home languages and English language proficiency levels. Some of the students are beginning readers in English. The teacher collects folktales from several countries to use for whole-class read-alouds and during small-group reading instruction. Which of the following statements accurately describes a feature of folktales and why that feature makes the genre especially well-suited for students in a multilingual, multicultural classroom?

Folktale themes tend to be universal, so students are likely to have the necessary schema to comprehend them

A third-grade teacher frequently uses an online application at the end of a lesson that allows the teacher to post a small task or question for students on the classroom computer. For example, after a lesson on prefixes, the teacher posts three base words and asks students to change the meaning of each word by adding an appropriate prefix from the lesson. Throughout the day, students post their individual responses for the teacher to review. In this scenario, the teacher is using technology for which of the following assessment purposes?

Formative assessment

At the beginning of the school year, a first-grade teacher conducts a brief screening assessment in which the teacher asks small groups of students to spell four CVC words and one word with a consonant blend (e.g., bag, hen, sit, mop, slug). In addition to providing the teacher with information about students' knowledge of letter-sound correspondences, this type of assessment would also provide information about students' development in which of the following other areas related to emergent reading?

Phonemic awareness

A first-grade classroom includes several students who are English learners. The teacher is preparing text-dependent prompts to ask students during a read-aloud of the big book The Napping House by Audrey Wood. The first set of prompts focuses on establishing the setting of the story. The text describes a house where everyone is sleeping. The illustration shows a granny sleeping in a bed, a cat sleeping on a chair, and a dog sleeping on the floor. It is raining outside the window. The teacher wants to align prompts about the setting of the story with the English learners' oral proficiency levels. Which of the following prompts would best align with a student who is at the beginning level of oral language proficiency in English?

Point to where everyone is sleeping.

The teacher observes that some students are having difficulty completing the right side of the blank SomebodyWanted-Because-But-So-Then chart. Which of the following scaffolding strategies would best help the students use the chart to develop summaries that convey story relationships?

adding a text-dependent question next to each of the summarizing prompts (e.g., "Because..." / "Why didn't Carlos want to ask his mother for help?")

A first-grade teacher provides reading instruction that is systematic and explicit and emphasizes both foundational reading skills and various dimensions of comprehension. According to research in preventing reading difficulties, which of the following additional actions would be most important for the teacher to take to ensure that reading instruction addresses all students' reading needs?

assessing students' reading development regularly to implement timely and effective instructional responses when a delay is apparent

A second-grade teacher periodically conducts reading interest surveys with individual students. The teacher could best use the results of these assessments for which of the following instructional purposes?

assisting students in selecting books for independent reading time

1. The teacher leads children in clapping the syllables of each classmate's name. 2. The teacher helps children count how many syllables they hear in their classmates' names. 3. The teacher has children with the same number of syllables in their names stand up and clap their classmates' names as a group.

build phonological sensitivity by attending to the phonological structure of meaningful words such as names.

During the second reading of the text, the teacher would like to focus students' attention on analyzing the author's craft. How can the teacher best achieve this goal?

by discussing how the text is constructed (e.g., who narrates the text; the use of dialogue, word choice, and diary structure)

A first-grade teacher is working with a small group of students that includes English learners and speakers of various dialects of English. As part of a series of lessons on the inflectional ending -ed, the teacher helps the students sort a list of inflected verbs according to their final sound or syllable. The teacher selected the verbs from a text the students are currently reading. The students' completed word-sort chart is shown below. The teacher's strategy of having the students sort and pronounce inflected verbs is likely to benefit the English learners and speakers of various dialects primarily in which of the following ways?

by helping the students learn to perceive and produce inflections that they may not use in their everyday speech

The teacher's practices in this scenario best demonstrate which of the following key principles of effective vocabulary instruction for prekindergarten children as described in the Texas Prekindergarten Guidelines?

creating ways for young children to interact with and use new vocabulary in meaningful contexts

A second-grade teacher divides the class into pairs and presents each pair of students with a unique set of word cards. The teacher models how to match two word cards to build a new word (e.g., mail + box = mailbox, some + thing = something). The teacher then challenges the students to work with their partners to build as many new words as they can using their own set of word cards. The students are assigned to make a list of their new words and draft a sentence for three of the words. Afterward, each pair of students reads aloud their lists of words and sentences to the class. This activity supports students' reading development primarily by promoting their ability to:

decode compound words quickly and accurately while reading.

A first-grade teacher would like to incorporate instruction in morphemes for students who have mastered reading and spelling closed- and open-syllable words. Which of the following skills is best aligned with both the teacher's goal and the continuum of word-reading skills described in the first-grade Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) for English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR)?

decoding and identifying the meaning of words with the inflectional endings -s, -es, and -ed

the teacher brings in a variety of building materials mentioned in the story The Little Yellow Chicken's House (e.g., straw, wood, stones) for the students to describe, sort, and categorize. The teacher also asks the students to describe how the character used the materials in his house. The teacher's actions best demonstrate attention to which of the following instructional goals?

developing oral language expression

purpose of formative Assessment

the purpose of a formative assessment is to obtain information about what students have learned and are able to do following instruction

Text: Making a Bird Feeder. Materials: one two-foot piece of string, one pinecone, honey, seeds, two bowls, one coat hanger Instructions: Step 1: Get the materials together. Step 2: Tie the string to the top and bottom of the pinecone.(Pausing) Hmm, I wonder why the instructions say to tie the string at each end? I'm going to keep reading and see. Step 3: Pour honey in one bowl and seeds into the other bowl. 4: Hold the string at each end, dip the pinecone in the honey, and then dip it in the seeds.(Pausing) Oh! Now I know why the instructions say to tie the string to each end! If I didn't, I think I would get honey all over my hands, and they would become sticky. Step 5: Tie each pinecone birdfeeder to a coat hanger until you are ready to hang them outside to attract bird friends. Which of the following text analysis skills does the teacher model during this think-aloud?

drawing conclusions about information in a text

A prekindergarten teacher is planning instruction in letter-sound relationships for a group of beginning-level English learners who have begun identifying and naming the letters of the alphabet. Which of the following strategies would likely be most effective to apply with this group of children?

employing articulatory feedback to help the children discover English letter-sounds that are not in their home language and learn how to pronounce them

After the third reading of the text, the teacher has students discuss whether the goldfish was happier when it was once again alone in a fishbowl or when it rejoined the other creatures in a large fish tank. The students must work with a partner to locate support from the text and illustrations for their claim. Conducting this type of collaborative conversation as part of a focused-rereading protocol benefits students' understanding of a complex text primarily by

encouraging students to co-construct meaning using evidence from the text

A second-grade student scores well above the 50th percentile benchmark for fluency on the midyear benchmark assessment. However, the teacher notes that the student reads the text word-by-word in a choppy, disjointed manner and has difficulty answering comprehension questions afterward. Which of the following strategies would be most important for the teacher to include in an intervention designed to address the student's assessed needs?

engaging in oral reading following teacher modeling using texts that are phrase-cued to approximate speech

Given the student's performance on the assessment, which of the following actions would be most appropriate for the teacher to take next?

engaging the student in phonemic awareness activities focused on final consonant blends

At the beginning of the school year, a kindergarten teacher determines that some students have had limited prior formal and informal literacy experiences. To accelerate these students' reading development, which of the following strategies would be most appropriate for the teacher to emphasize?

engaging the students in interactive read-alouds using predictable big books that feature rhyming words to promote their development of concepts of print, phonological awareness, and knowledge of text structure

As part of an informal assessment of students' phonemic awareness skills, a kindergarten teacher meets with individual students and says, "We're going to play a word game. I'm going to say a word that you know. When you hear it, I want you to say each sound in the word in the right order. For example, if I say fan, you should say IăQ." The teacher then helps the student practice the procedure using the practice words in, sat, and top. After meeting with each student, the teacher reviews students' performance and notices that several students performed similarly on the assessment. A representative sample of their assessment results is shown below.

identifying and matching the initial, medial, and final sounds of words represented by pictures

As the story progresses, more characters enter the bedroom and pile on the snoring granny to take a nap. The teacher asks students to describe what is occurring on each page. In response to the text and illustrations, one English learner says, "Mouse sleep on cat. Cat sleep on dog." The student's grammar is most typical of an English learner at which of the following levels of English language proficiency?

intermediate

A kindergarten teacher is planning instruction for a small group of students who have mastered the letter-sound relationships for the consonants m, s, t, and p and for the short-vowel sound of the letter a. The students also consistently spell words using both initial and final consonant sounds in their daily writing. Given this information, which of the following instructional activities would be most appropriate for the teacher to use with these students to promote their transition to the next step along the continuum of development of knowledge and skills related to the alphabetic principle?

introducing the students to early decodable texts featuring known letter-sound relationships and modeling how to sound out the words

A first-grade teacher conducts a series of phonics lessons with a small group of students. The teacher supports instruction by providing the students with oral reading practice using decodable texts that feature the phonics skill being taught. After providing instruction and guided practice in the target phonics skill, the teacher administers a 10-word oral reading assessment to individual students in the group. The assessment includes target words from the decodable texts the students read as well as new words that are unfamiliar to the students but that require them to use the same phonics skill targeted in the lessons.

monitoring students' progress toward mastery of a reading skill

Which of the following practices by a prekindergarten teacher best reflects an assets-based approach to reading instruction?

planning instruction in various areas of reading using continually adjusted flexible groupings according to each child's current assessed knowledge and skills

A third-grade teacher reviews data on the literacy skills of several beginning-level English learners who did not attend school prior to moving to the United States. The teacher wants to plan appropriate small-group reading instruction for the students. Which of the following types of text would best meet the reading development needs of English learners who are at an emergent stage of English language development and at the pre-alphabetic phase of word reading?

predictable text

A kindergarten teacher reads aloud the big book The Little Yellow Chicken's House by Joy Cowley to a small group of students. In the story, the main character has to make a decision as to whether or not his friends should come into the warm cozy house he built to get out of the rain, since they refused his requests for help during construction of the house. The teacher has the students orally rehearse their opinion as to whether or not the unhelpful characters should be allowed into the house. The teacher asks the students to include in their responses the reason for their opinion. As each student tells an opinion, the teacher holds up a sign that says "because" to prompt students to add to their responses.

promoting students' use of sentences and grammatical structures of increasing complexity

Students in a second-grade class have been learning about synonyms. As part of an introduction to the term antonym, the teacher reads aloud the book If You Were an Antonym by Nancy Loewen. In this book, the author explains what an antonym is and provides many examples of different types of antonyms. After discussing the book with students, the teacher models how to create a semantic map of a word's synonyms and antonyms using a simple two-column format. The teacher writes the word "cold" at the top of the chart and prompts students to help generate words for each column. The teacher encourages the students to think of words from the book the teacher just read aloud as well as from other books the students have recently read in class. This type of activity benefits students' vocabulary development most directly by:

promoting their understanding of the relationships between words.

A second-grade teacher analyzes the summary results of a student's oral reading fluency measure, shown below. Book level: Early second grade Accuracy rate: 92% Error rate: 1:12 (average of 1 error for every 12 words read) Self-correction rate: 1:6 (average of 1 self-correction for every 6 errors) Teacher: I noticed that you used some very good strategies. When you read the word of instead of off, you could tell it didn't sound right in the sentence, and you fixed it right away. Of and off look a little alike, but they're not the same. I also noticed that you were thinking about what is happening in the story, and you used that to help decide whether a word you read makes sense. Let's look at this word right here (pointing to the word rolls in the text). You read goes. Let's check the first letter. What is it? Student: It's r. Oh! It says rolls! Teacher: Yes! When you read goes, it made sense, but it didn't sound right. Rolls makes sense, and it also sounds right

providing feedback to students in ways that encourage, support, and motivate them in their reading development

A first-grade student has been identified as having dyslexia and has begun intervention. Which of the following approaches to instruction would be most effective to enhance the student's reading development?

providing the student with systematic, explicit multimodal instruction in all the essential, evidence-based components of reading

A prekindergarten teacher is preparing an introductory lesson focused on isolating/identifying the initial sound in spoken words for a small group of children whose informal assessments indicate that they are ready to learn this skill. The group includes an English learner. Which of the following instructional supports would best promote the English learner's success in achieving the instructional goal of this lesson?

selecting stimulus words for the lesson that have sounds common to both English and the English learner's home language

A third-grade English learner has grade-level decoding skills and scores around the grade-level benchmark for words correct per minute on oral reading fluency measures. However, the student's text comprehension is mixed. The student comprehends some literary and informational texts with ease, yet struggles with others. Given this evidence, when the student is having difficulty with a text, the teacher's best initial response should be to:

talk with the student to informally assess the extent of the student's background knowledge about the text's topic or setting

A kindergarten teacher reads a decodable text about cats with a small group of students and then incorporates the content of the text into an interactive writing lesson. First, the teacher has students orally generate several sentences that relate to the actions of the cat in the story. The teacher then says, "Those are great sentences. Help me write them on the chart paper." For each decodable word in a sentence, the teacher pauses to prompt the students to listen to the sounds of the word and use their knowledge of the letter-sound correspondences that they practiced in the decodable text to identify which letter the teacher should write next. This scenario best demonstrates the teacher's awareness of which of the following concepts related to students' development of beginning reading skills?

the importance of applying newly taught phonics elements to writing

A second-grade teacher frequently uses the strategy of phoneme-grapheme mapping as part of phonics instruction. The teacher selects target words from a phonics lesson and creates sound boxes corresponding to the words. The teacher then helps students write the target words in the sound boxes, making sure that students map each sound of a word to a single box. Examples of sound boxes from two different phonics lessons are shown below.

the importance of utilizing the reciprocity between decoding and encoding to reinforce phonics instruction

Before assigning students a new science or social studies text, a third-grade teacher introduces important Tier Three terms from the text. As part of the introduction, the teacher leads students in applying morphemic analysis skills to the words and also discusses new concepts related to the words. The teacher's actions best reflect an understanding of which of the following factors that can disrupt reading fluency and affect comprehension?

unfamiliarity with a text's content