Foundations of Reading Practice Test
Which of the following statements best describes the relationship between word decoding and reading comprehension in a beginning reader's development?
Decoding skills are essential for the development of reading fluency to support reading comprehension.
A second-grade class is studying a social studies unit focused on geography (e.g., bodies of water, landforms) and its effects on people. So far, the students have learned about lakes, oceans, and bays. As part of the unit, the teacher reads aloud an informational passage that explains why human settlements near rivers historically have succeeded and grown. The teacher pauses regularly to discuss the reading, using a range of text-based questions to prompt discussion and promote students' literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension. Part of the text appears below. Rivers have fresh water. Fish and other wildlife live in and near rivers. The soil near rivers is good for growing crops and grazing animals. But rivers provided towns with more than just what people needed to survive. Moving water provided a source of power that people could harness for industry. And, over time, large rivers became superhighways for travel and trade across great distances. Which of the following questions about this part of the text would most effectively target students' inferential comprehension?
Do you think living near a river makes life easier or more difficult for people, and what information in the text makes you think so?
Two proficient readers are answering post-reading comprehension questions about a chapter in a content-area textbook. • The first student demonstrates exceptional recall of details from the chapter but has difficulty answering questions about the gist of the chapter. • The second student can give an outstanding summary of the chapter but has difficulty remembering specific facts from the chapter. Which of the following best explains the most likely reason for the students' varied understanding of the text?
Each student applied different reading comprehension skills when reading the text
Which of the following sentences contains a pair of italicized words that differ from each other by one phoneme?
He took off his cap before he lay down to take a nap
A fifth-grade teacher plans to use the passage below in a lesson focused on analyzing literary texts. Zander told me it didn't matter what the exact rules were, or what was "fair" according to Coach. What mattered most was the team winning against Sagamore and advancing to the next level. "So, okay? You in?" he asked me. I just looked at him without saying a word. I like Zander. He's funny, smart, popular—everything I'm not. So I wanted to say, Sure, let's do it. But I kept seeing Coach's face in my mind, like he was looking me right in the eye. "I don't know," I said slowly. Zander's eyes narrowed and his mouth set firmly shut. Oh, great, I thought. Now I'll have NO friends at school. The teacher is planning text-based questions to use in a post-reading discussion about the passage. Which of the following organizing questions would most effectively prompt students' higher-order analysis of this passage?
How are the narrator's relationships with Zander and Coach similar and yet different?
A group of fifth-grade students finishes reading a novel written in the first person. The teacher has the students work together to write a new account of a key scene as it might be reported by a different major character. Which of the following questions would be the most appropriate focus of a group discussion following the writing activity?
How does the narrative point of view in a story shape a reader's understanding of events?
A group of first-grade students has mastered reading single-syllable words that follow the closed-syllable patterns VC, CVC, CVCC, and CCVC. The teacher would like to expand students' reading development by teaching them how to read two-syllable words that consist of closed syllables, such as picnic, muffin, trumpet, pretzel, invent, and frantic. The teacher could best promote the students' accurate, efficient reading of this type of word by teaching them to use which of the following decoding strategies?
Look at the vowels in a target word; if they are separated by two consonants, divide the word between the consonants (e.g., muf/fin), and then read each syllable from left to right.
Which of the following rationales best describes the advantage of using poems for fluency practice?
Poetry is meant to be read aloud and reread many times to construct meaning.
Which of the following statements describes the most important reason for a fourth-grade teacher to assign a variety of high-quality trade books as a component of reading instruction?
Reading across genres contributes to students' developing understanding of the structures and features of different texts.
Which of the following statements provides the best rationale for incorporating spelling instruction into a first-grade reading program?
Spelling instruction reinforces students' knowledge of phonics patterns, which supports their development of automaticity and ability to construct meaning while reading.
A kindergarten teacher encourages beginning readers to "write" their own captions beneath their drawings. This practice is most likely to lead to which of the following outcomes?
The children's grasp of the alphabetic principle will be reinforced as they apply phonetic spelling.
Which of the following principles is best illustrated by the words watched, wanted, and warned?
The spelling of a suffix is often more reliable than its pronunciation.
Sixth-grade students have just finished reading a chapter in a novel and are getting ready to write an entry in their response journals. The teacher could most effectively develop students' literary response skills by assigning which of the following journal prompts?
What do you think is the main idea or theme of the novel? Relate specific events in this chapter to the theme you suggest.
Which of the following students is demonstrating the specific type of phonological awareness known as phonemic awareness?
a student who, after hearing the word hat, can orally identify that it ends with the sound /t/
Over the course of the school year, a sixth-grade student who had been a fluent, proficient reader in previous years has become increasingly inconsistent in comprehending gradelevel literary and informational texts assigned in class. The results of informal, curriculumbased assessments indicate that the student still meets grade-level expectations in vocabulary knowledge, but the student's reading rate and comprehension have dropped below grade-level expectations. The teacher observes that the student does not read smoothly when reading aloud sentences that contain more than one clause, and the student often comments about "getting lost in the sentence." The teacher is also aware that the student tends to choose fiction and graphic novels for independent reading that are written well below grade-level expectations. The student's overall reading profile suggests that the student would likely benefit most from explicit instruction focused on promoting the student's:
ability to deconstruct complex academic language and interpret its meaning.
A second-grade teacher regularly reviews spelling patterns previously taught. The teacher also provides students with multiple opportunities to read and write connected text that features words containing the spelling patterns and to engage in word sorts comparing new and previously taught spelling patterns. These types of instructional activities are likely to promote students' reading skills primarily by developing their:
accuracy and automaticity reading words that follow the target phonics patterns.
A third-grade class that includes several English learners is preparing to read a text about the life cycles of various organisms (e.g., plants, mammals, reptiles). Which of the following teaching strategies would be most effective in promoting the English learners' comprehension of the text?
activating the students' prior knowledge about the topic and providing visual aids such as illustrations to clarify new vocabulary
By halfway through the school year, a majority of students in the class are making good progress reading the poems with fluency. However, a handful of students still read the poems haltingly, word by word, and ignore punctuation. Which of the following explicit, evidenced-based strategies would best transition the students away from word-by-word reading during the daily poetry activity?
adding phrase-cues to the students' poetry booklets and modeling how to read aloud in phrases
A second-grade teacher works several times a week with a Tier 2 intervention group. At the beginning of the intervention, all the students in the group had strengths in oral reading fluency and challenges in text comprehension. As instruction proceeds, which of the following actions best aligns with key principles of a Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) model of instruction?
adjusting instruction for individual students according to their responses to the intervention
A sixth-grade teacher gives students several essays that present contrasting opinions on a current social issue. The teacher then asks students to consider the following questions as they read the texts. 1. What is the author's opinion on the issue? 2. How might the author's background influence the opinion? 3. What evidence does the author use to support the opinion? These questions support students' reading comprehension primarily by prompting them to:
analyze points of view in expository texts.
A first-grade teacher would like to promote students' development of accurate decoding to support their oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. The teacher could most effectively promote first graders' accuracy by teaching them how to:
apply phonics skills and knowledge of common syllable types and inflections to read words.
A third-grade teacher observes that students who can read aloud fluently also demonstrate greater comprehension of expository texts. The best explanation for this is that fluent readers:
are able to focus their full attention and cognitive resources on the meaning of a text.
Which of the following strategies would be most appropriate to use to promote secondgrade students' ability to analyze key ideas and details in a literary text?
asking students text-dependent who, what, where, when, why, and how questions about story elements
Which of the following strategies would be most appropriate for the teacher to use to differentiate the retelling assessment for children who are advanced readers?
asking the children to elaborate on specific story elements, such as characters' responses to events and challenges
A kindergarten teacher is reading a big book to a group of children. The teacher periodically points to the beginning consonant of selected words and accentuates its initial phoneme as the teacher reads the word aloud. The teacher's practice is most likely to reinforce the children's:
awareness of letter-sound correspondences.
A fourth-grade student tries to decode the word accumulate in a science article by using syllabication skills. In order to read the individual syllables of the word after dividing them correctly, the student would need to be proficient in decoding which of the following syllable types?
closed, open, silent e
As students begin to read, the ability to blend phonemes orally contributes to their reading development primarily because it prepares students to:
combine letter-sounds to decode words.
According to evidence-based practices, which of the following resources in a first-grade classroom best supports phonics instruction as a major component of reading instruction?
decodable texts tied directly to the instructional scope and sequence of skills
A sixth-grade teacher is planning explicit instruction to develop students' ability to read and understand sentences that have a complex sentence structure. Which of the following skills would be most effective for the teacher to focus on?
deconstructing complex sentences into independent and dependent clauses
When considering how to support students who are at risk for reading difficulties, an elementary school teacher first tries to align an individual student's profile with one of the following evidencebased reading-difficulty profiles. Profile 1: The student reads words accurately and efficiently but demonstrates needs in word knowledge and/or comprehension skills. Profile 2: The student demonstrates needs in decoding and word recognition but has strong word knowledge and comprehension skills. Profile 3: The student demonstrates needs in decoding and word recognition and also in word knowledge and comprehension skills. One advantage of the teacher keeping these general profiles in mind when considering whether a student may be at risk for reading difficulties is that it helps the teacher
determine a direction for specific diagnostic probes (e.g., identifying gaps in phonics knowledge using a word-pattern survey).
Having kindergarten children practice tracing the letters of the alphabet in sand is most appropriate for children who need additional support in:
developing letter-formation skills.
A prekindergarten teacher is reading a storybook to the class so that the children can see the words and pictures while the teacher points to the line of print. This activity best contributes to the children's emergent reading development primarily by:
developing their awareness of left-to-right directionality.
A fifth-grade student reads the sentence, "After playing with her friends all day, Kaylee did her science homework, her geography project, and her English paper in one fell swoop." The student asks the teacher for support in understanding the meaning of the phrase one fell swoop. After explaining the phrase's meaning, the teacher could best deepen and extend the student's understanding of this idiomatic expression by:
discussing with the student additional examples of the phrase used in context.
A second-grade teacher is reading aloud a literary text to the class. Which of the following post-reading activities would be most likely to promote the students' comprehension of the story by enhancing their literary analysis skills?
discussing with the students how the characters in the story respond to major events and challenges
A kindergarten teacher engages a small group of children in the following Say It and Move It activity. • The teacher says a two-phoneme word slowly (e.g., ape, bee, day, eat, go, she, toe). • The children slowly repeat the word. • The children move a plain wooden block as they say each phoneme, lining up the two blocks from left to right. Once the children demonstrate mastery of this activity, which of the following strategies would be most appropriate for the teacher to use next to build the children's phonemic awareness?
displaying pictures for a pair of two- and three-phoneme words that differ by a single phoneme (e.g., toe, toad) and having the children complete the Say It and Move It activity for each word in the pair
A fifth-grade teacher gives students a "reading planner" for an informational text that they will be reading independently. The reading planner contains various activities, including prompting students to summarize certain passages, to explain relationships between concepts according to specific information in the text, and to determine the meaning of domain-specific words based on appositives or appositive phrases embedded in the text. This reading planner is likely to be most effective for achieving which of the following instructional purposes?
encouraging students to read and interact closely with the text
Before beginning a new content-area reading passage, a fourth-grade teacher asks students to think of words related to the topic of the text. The teacher writes the words on the board and then asks the students to suggest ways to group the words based on meaningful connections. The teacher also encourages them to explain their reasons for grouping particular words together. This series of activities is likely to promote the students' reading development primarily by helping them:
extend and reinforce their expressive and receptive vocabularies related to the text's topic.
In the years since the report by the National Reading Panel (2000) was published, evidence-based research has conclusively documented that which of the following phonics approaches is most effective in promoting beginning readers' reading and spelling development?
focusing on grapheme-phoneme correspondences, in which students are taught explicitly to sound out each letter or letter combination in a word and blend the lettersounds together
If a standardized test is said to lack reliability, the test:
gives fluctuating scores in different administrations.
An entering second-grade student performs well below benchmarks on the universal screening for oral reading fluency. These results are aligned with the teacher's observation that the student does not read with fluency when reading aloud during daily reading activities. At this stage of reading development, the factor that is most likely disrupting the student's reading fluency is that the student does not:
have the phonics knowledge and skills needed to decode the words in the texts.
Over the course of the unit, the class reads and analyzes the themes of several, increasingly complex, grade-level poems. Near the end of the unit, the teacher will have students practice literary analysis skills on an unfamiliar grade-level poem. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following differentiation strategies would be most appropriate for the teacher to use with advanced readers during this lesson?
having all students work in small, homogeneous groups to analyze a poem at an appropriate level of complexity for the group
A fourth-grade teacher is planning a lesson focused on promoting students' recognition of distinguishing features of prose, poetry, and drama. The teacher plans to begin the lesson by having students follow along as the teacher reads aloud three short passages—a chapter from a novel, a narrative poem, and a scene from a play. Afterward, the teacher plans to lead a whole-class discussion about the passages. Which of the following postreading activities would be most effective in helping the students prepare for the discussion and achieve the lesson's objective?
having pairs of students use a graphic organizer to compare how major story elements such as setting, characters, and plot are conveyed in the three passages
Two students in the class with a learning disability are successful in generating multimorphemic words when presented with a familiar base word and a simple suffix (e.g., -s, -ed). However, when presented with a familiar prefix, base word or root, and suffix, they cannot generate any new words, with or without the support of the matrix. Which of the following strategies for differentiating the lesson would be most appropriate for supporting the students' development in structural or morphemic analysis?
having the students begin with a two-box matrix using a few common inflections and then gradually introducing one new derivational affix at a time and explaining how each affix changes the meaning of the base word
A third-grade student performs below grade-level expectations in word-reading accuracy on informal assessments. Since the majority of the student's errors are with multisyllable words, the teacher plans to provide the student with daily explicit instruction for one week on the use of syllable-division strategies for reading multisyllable words. The teacher will then reassess the student at the end of the trial period. The primary benefit of this approach to informal assessment is that it:
helps the teacher determine whether the student has the potential for improvement with short-term intervention.
A kindergarten teacher regularly elicits oral retellings of stories children have listened to or read as a way to assess their understanding of narrative text structures. The retell protocol the teacher uses has a child retell the story to a stuffed animal, named Storalee, as the teacher records notes and checks off story components. The teacher starts with the prompt, "Tell our friend Storalee the whole story because she has not heard it before." The teacher rates each child's understanding of the text's characters, setting, events, and relationships according to standards-based rubric descriptors for story elements. Which of the following components should be included in the story elements rubric to ensure that the assessment will provide information about children's understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships found in narrative texts?
identifying evidence of children's use of conjunctions (e.g., because, so, since) to connect the character's motivation to actions taken
Several children in a kindergarten class have mastered orally blending sets of spoken sounds together to make words. Which of the following additional skills demonstrated by the children would best indicate that they are ready to begin instruction in decoding simple words?
identifying letter-sound correspondences consistently for several high-utility letters, such as a, m, t, and s, when prompted by the teacher
A fourth-grade class will be comparing the treatment of a similar theme, "family ties," in stories from different countries. After students read the stories independently, the teacher plans to lead close rereadings focused on the influence of culture on the target theme. Which of the following teaching preparation strategies would be most essential and effective for achieving the goals of this lesson?
identifying passages in each story that are essential to understanding the author's perspective and key words or other stylistic choices that convey certain values
A third-grade teacher has been conducting a series of ongoing assessments of a student's oral reading. Shown below is a sentence from a text, followed by a transcription of the student reading the text. The sample is representative of the student's typical oral reading performance. Text: Up ahead, Julia saw the overturned boat disappear over the waterfall's edge. Student: "Up ahead, Julie saw the overtired boat (pauses reading) overturned boat disappoint over the water's edge (pauses reading) disappear over the water's edge." Given the information provided, the teacher could best address this student's needs by providing targeted, evidence-based instruction focused on:
improving reading accuracy by attending to all parts of a word.
A second-grade teacher is working with a small group of students to improve their oral reading fluency. As part of lesson planning, the teacher analyzes the students' oral reading errors and plans instruction to address phonics knowledge and skills not yet mastered. The teacher's actions are likely to benefit the students' reading fluency most directly by:
improving the students' reading accuracy, a key component of fluency.
A third-grade class includes students with delays in foundational reading skills. Two students also have delays in language expression and comprehension. The teacher is considering ways to best support the students' reading development. The teacher would also like to provide appropriate supports for the students during the planned biweekly whole-class close-reading routine, in which the teacher will engage the students in reading and rereading a variety of complex literary and informational passages. The teacher wants to support the students with literacy delays in developing selfconfidence and self-efficacy as readers. Which of the following strategies would be most appropriate for this purpose?
instructing the students explicitly in how to use various word-reading and comprehension-repair strategies to solve reading challenges
A fifth-grade class silently reads an informational text. In subsequent informal assessments, several students are able to read the text orally with fluency, but they demonstrate poor overall comprehension of the text. The teacher could most appropriately address these students' needs by adjusting future instruction in which of the following ways?
introducing a text's key vocabulary and supporting the students in close reading of key passages
Which of the following activities would be most effective for a teacher to use to promote students' strategic reading of literary texts?
leading students in frequent small-group discussions and close readings focused on relevant strategies (e.g., skimming, rereading) to use for different academic tasks and purposes
A sixth-grade student encounters the following sentence in a short story. She experienced a sense of déjà vu as she walked down the street of the strange new city. The student asks the teacher about the meaning of déjà vu in the sentence. The teacher could best respond by advising the student to take which of the following steps?
looking up the word in the dictionary, and then paraphrasing the sentence using the dictionary definition
Fourth-grade students silently read an assigned text for part of the English language arts block and then meet for a small-group discussion of the text in another part of the block. During the silent reading portion, the teacher instructs students to use stick-on notes to bookmark passages where they make predictions, ask or answer questions, or encounter an unfamiliar word. In addition to anchoring the group discussions in the text, this practice benefits students primarily by increasing their:
metacognitive awareness while reading.
Students in a fourth-grade class read a text that includes the word indefensible, which is unfamiliar to some of them. Which of the following strategies for teaching the word would be most effective in both clarifying the meaning of the word and extending the students' understanding and use of an appropriate word-learning strategy?
modeling for the students how to apply knowledge of morphology to construct the word's meaning and use context to confirm it
A third-grade teacher periodically reads aloud from a chapter in content-area textbooks using think-aloud while reading. Following is an example. "The moon does not shine on its own. The sun's light reflects off the moon." Hmm. I'm imagining that the sun is like a flashlight shining on the moon in the dark. "As the moon rotates, only the part that faces the sun is visible from the Earth." I'm not quite sure what 'visible' means, but it sounds kind of like vision, which I know has to do with eyes. It probably means the part that we can see from the Earth. Now, that makes me wonder— why do we see different amounts of the moon at different times? Let's see if the next part of the chapter explains this. ..." The teacher's practice is most likely to promote students' reading comprehension of informational texts by:
modeling for them metacognitive comprehension strategies.
The teacher decides to collect ongoing data related to vocabulary instruction. The teacher records examples of students' use of new vocabulary during class discussions and has students turn in weekly examples of how they use new words in their writing. The teacher also has students maintain a vocabulary journal in which they develop definitions for new Tier Two and Tier Three vocabulary in their own words, make visual representations of word meanings, and analyze changes to a word's form and meaning when affixes are added. This approach to informal assessment benefits literacy instruction primarily by allowing the teacher to:
monitor various dimensions of students' vocabulary development across multiple language modes.
A third-grade teacher notes that students' vocabulary scores on a school-wide standardized achievement test are below the national average and below their performance on the comprehension and decoding subtests. The type of reading assessment described in the scenario that compares students' reading performance to the performance of students in a national sample group can best be categorized as:
norm referenced
Which of the following tasks requires the most advanced level of skill along the phonological awareness continuum?
orally segmenting the phonemes in the word chimp and then substituting /ŏ/ for /ĭ/ to make a new word, chomp
A teacher is planning reading instruction for a small group of students who exhibit the following characteristics. • The students can point accurately to words in predictable texts after listening to and following the teacher reading aloud and tracking the text several times using a big book format. • The students can identify the beginning and final sounds of simple threephoneme words presented orally and can sometimes identify a word's medial sound. • The students have developed sound-symbols associations for the majority of consonant sounds and some vowel sounds. • The students can read several high-frequency words in simple texts. • The students can spell words with an accurate beginning consonant sound and sometimes an accurate final consonant sound. Given these characteristics, the students are most likely beginning to transition to which of the following phases of word reading?
partial alphabetic
Early in the school year, a fifth-grade teacher analyzes the results of a developmental spelling survey to identify students' strengths and needs as spellers. Using this information, the teacher plans whole-group instruction for spelling elements and patterns the majority of students need to learn (e.g., fifth-grade-level prefixes and suffixes). However, some students have not yet mastered earlier spelling elements or patterns, while other students are ready to learn elements that are beyond the scope of the fifthgrade spelling curriculum. Which of the following approaches to spelling instruction would best address this diversity of skills?
planning differentiated instruction using flexible grouping
Which of the following sets of words would be most effective to use when introducing students to the concept of structural/morphemic analysis?
pretest, retest, tested, testing
Skimming is likely to be the most effective strategy for accomplishing which of the following reading tasks?
previewing a chapter in a content-area textbook
A first-grade teacher designs the following activity. 1. Divide students into pairs. 2. Have the two students sit back-to-back. 3. Give a student in each pair a picture of a familiar object to describe. 4. Have the second student try to name the object based on the description. 5. If the second student cannot determine the target object, instruct the student describing the object to use more precise language (e.g., describing the object's color, texture, size, use). 6. The student pairs switch roles and repeat steps 2-5. This activity is likely to contribute to students' literacy development primarily by:
promoting their oral language development and listening comprehension.
During a series of integrated science and literacy lessons, a third-grade teacher plans to have students read several articles from a children's magazine about new technologies for cleaning up pollution in the oceans. After they read the articles, students will work in small groups to create a graphic organizer comparing and contrasting two of the solutions. To prepare students to integrate information across texts in this activity, which of the following steps would be most essential for the teacher to take?
providing explicit instruction in how to identify the most important points and key details presented in the texts
A second-grade teacher wants to ensure that students become automatic in recognizing the orthographic patterns they are explicitly taught during decoding instruction. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following instructional strategies best promotes students' automatic recognition of a new orthographic pattern to support proficient reading?
providing practice with phoneme-grapheme mapping and various reading and spelling activities that focus on words containing the new orthographic pattern
A second-grade class includes several students who are developing-level (intermediate) English learners. The teacher is planning to use a whole-class read-aloud to provide instruction in making inferences when reading informational text. Which of the following differentiation strategies would best support students with diverse language abilities in making text-based inferences?
providing the English learners with sentence frames to scaffold the lesson (e.g., "I think that ________. I think so because I read ________ and because I know that ________.")
A third-grade teacher has students work on their oral reading fluency each day using a repeated-reading approach. Students work with a classmate to take turns reading an assigned grade-level text and timing each other's oral reading fluency rate. Some students in the class are currently participating in Tier 2 interventions to address identified gaps in grade-level decoding skills. The teacher differentiates the repeated-reading activity for these students by selecting texts that are aligned with the decoding skills they have been studying. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following additional modifications to the activity should the teacher make in order to improve the students' oral reading performance with their assigned text?
providing the individual students with explicit teacher feedback with respect to their reading accuracy and prosody between readings
An entering third-grade student with a specific learning disability demonstrates reading comprehension that is below grade-level expectations. The student can read aloud narrative texts that are aligned with second-grade expectations with accuracy and fluency; however, the student does not consistently remember key details or events after reading the texts. In keeping with evidence-based best practices, which of the following strategies would be most appropriate for the teacher to try first to support the student's reading comprehension with literary texts?
providing the student with explicit instruction in story elements using a graphic organizer
Which of the following strategies for differentiating collaborative text-based discussions for the students with language-expression challenges would best enhance their participation in the text-based discussions and their overall language development?
providing the students with relevant sentence or language frames to scaffold their responses
A second-grade teacher pairs students with appropriate, accessible texts for a paired reading activity. During the activity, two students sit side by side and take turns reading an entire short text aloud. Over a period of several days, the pairs of students read and reread a large number of accessible texts together. This activity best promotes students' development of:
reading rate and automaticity.
A teacher is working with a group of learners who exhibit the following characteristics. • The students can accurately read single-syllable words that feature closed, open, and silent-e syllables; and vowel-team syllables that make a long-vowel sound. • The students can accurately read multisyllable words that feature closed and open syllables. Which of the following sets of words includes appropriate types of syllables to provide the students with practice applying their knowledge of syllable types to read decodable multisyllable words?
reveal, combine, explain
A first-grade teacher administers a spelling assessment midway through the school year. Afterward, the teacher analyzes students' spelling errors and categorizes the errors according to their most likely cause. Phonemic Awareness—The spelling error indicates difficulty perceiving all the sounds in words. Code—The spelling error indicates a code-based difficulty (i.e., mastery of specific phonics/morphemic elements and associated orthographic patterns). Several students in the class make spelling errors that primarily fall under the category of phonemic awareness. The students' spelling development would benefit most from an intervention focused on promoting their ability to apply which of the following foundational skills?
segmenting sequentially all the phonemes that make up a spoken word
The teacher is planning progress monitoring for students whose reading performance fits one of the three profiles and who will be receiving differentiated instruction or an intervention to address their identified needs. Which of the following guidelines would be most important for the teacher to follow when planning progress-monitoring for this purpose?
selecting assessment instruments or techniques that will show even small improvements
The teacher has arranged for various adult volunteers to participate during the morning "fluency warm-up." According to evidence-based instruction, the teacher could best use the volunteers to support students' development of prosody by:
showing the volunteers how to model appropriate oral reading of a target poem and engage students in echo reading.
A prekindergarten teacher asks a small group of children to listen to and repeat what the teacher says. First, the teacher says the word mop and then pronounces it as /m/ and [ŏp]. Next, the teacher says the word take and then pronounces it as /t/ and [āk]. This activity is likely to promote the children's phonological awareness primarily by:
showing them how to segment words into onsets and rimes.
A teacher is selecting words to use to assess students' ability to segment the individual phonemes in spoken words. Which of the following words would require the highest level of skill with regard to orally segmenting phonemes?
stamp
A third-grade teacher is planning differentiated reading instruction for an entering-level English learner who has grade-level reading skills in a language that uses the Roman alphabet. The teacher could best accelerate the student's progress in reading English by using which of the following approaches?
supporting the student in identifying consonant sounds that both languages have in common while systematically teaching common English syllable types to introduce English vowel patterns and pronunciations
Some children in a kindergarten class have had limited prior exposure to storybooks read aloud and/or limited prior experiences discussing narrative texts. Their teacher wants to develop their knowledge of story structure. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following instructional approaches is most likely to accelerate the children's understanding of the causal nature of story events?
teaching story elements explicitly, such as main character, goal or problem, and resolution, as part of the daily read-aloud
Which of the following instructional strategies would be most effective in promoting students' decoding of multisyllable words that are not multimorphemic?
teaching students how to divide multisyllable words into syllables according to common syllable types
According to basic principles of evidence-based, systematic phonics instruction, which of the following common English letter combinations would be most appropriate for a firstgrade teacher to introduce first?
th
A group of third-grade students reads a poem aloud accurately but without much expression. Before asking the students text-dependent questions about the poem's content, the teacher spends time focusing on phrase-cueing. For example, the teacher asks the students to "Read the phrase that tells us ________" or "Identify the phrase that describes ________". After focusing on key phrases, the teacher conducts an expressive oral reading of the poem, focusing on proper pausing and expression, especially with respect to the phrases they discussed. Finally, the teacher leads the students in an expressive choral reading of the poem. Engaging the students in these activities prior to discussing the meaning of the poem demonstrates the teacher's understanding of:
the role of fluency as a bridge between simply decoding a text and comprehending it.
A fifth-grade teacher plans to have students read a chapter about the American Revolutionary War from their social studies textbook. The following is an excerpt from the chapter. The Battle of Bunker Hill took place on June 17, 1775. At the time, the American army occupied the area from Cambridge to the Mystic River. American troops gathered in Cambridge Common on the evening of June 16, 1775, and set out for Bunker Hill. Upon reaching Bunker Hill, however, officers decided to move to Breed's Hill, a smaller hill closer to Boston. Given this excerpt from the chapter, which of the following graphic organizers would best promote students' awareness of the chapter's text structure?
timeline
A second-grade class includes several expanding-level (advanced) English learners. The teacher typically previews a variety of texts to help select appropriate passages for English language arts instruction. Following is an excerpt from one of the texts the teacher is considering. Edward's and Jo's eyes met. Edward blinked. "There was a letter on the table a second ago. Where did it go?" Jo asked. Edward shrugged. "I wouldn't know," he said. "Don't give me that!" snapped Jo. Edward could see that his older sister was about to blow a fuse. "No need to bite my head off," he said. "It's got to be here somewhere!" As Jo turned around to scan the room, Edward quickly took the letter from his jacket pocket and chucked it under the table The English learners are most likely to need support with which of the following comprehension challenges in this passage?
understanding idiomatic meanings of some words and phrases
Which of the following guidelines for planning effective reading instruction for these students best addresses the evidence-based recommendation that foundational reading skills should be taught in conjunction with building a foundation for reading comprehension?
using decodable texts to promote the students' ability to read a text with fluency while also selecting complex, grade-level texts for read alouds and text analysis
A second-grade student demonstrates automaticity decoding grade-level regular and irregular words. However, the student frequently experiences poor text comprehension with informational texts. Which of the following steps should the teacher take first to promote the student's reading development?
using questioning to determine the student's vocabulary and background knowledge with respect to the target texts
In response to students' performance on the vocabulary measure, the teacher plans to take a more systematic and robust approach to vocabulary instruction. The teacher's use of the data best underscores the importance of which of the following approaches to reading assessment?
using results from reading assessments to guide instructional decision making
A second-grade teacher frequently reads aloud informational books related to grade-level content in social studies, science, and the arts. The teacher supports students in developing their own questions during and after the read-alouds and then helps them conduct research on their questions using grade-level resources the teacher has collected on these topics. In keeping with evidence-based best practices, providing direct instruction in which of the following aspects of informational text would be most essential to students' success and growing independence in using informational texts for personal research?
using text features to locate specific information in a text
A fifth-grade teacher is planning a literature study focused on how various elements of an author's craft are used to convey a poem's theme. The class includes students with a wide range of reading and language skills, including several advanced readers. In an early lesson, the teacher distributes a simple short poem and a printed copy of the graphic organizer shown below The teacher has students read the poem twice. First, they read it silently. Then, they follow along as the teacher reads the poem aloud. In keeping with evidence-based best practices in reading instruction, which of the following steps would be most effective for the teacher to implement next in this lesson?
using think-aloud and questioning to complete the graphic organizer on the board with students' support
Considerations of validity in test construction relate most closely to:
whether the test questions effectively measure their specified content.
A fifth-grade teacher is about to begin a new unit on ecosystems, with an emphasis on the movement of matter among the various components of an ecosystem. Which of the following types of vocabulary words from the unit would be most appropriate for the teacher to pre-teach?
words that are conceptually challenging
