READING

Read the selection and answer questions.
Strategies:
Reading
Scan the story
Read the questions first
Carefully read the text
Re-read the questions

Answering Questions:
Mulitple choice
Cross out the wrong answer
Ask:Which one sounds the best?
Short answer questions?
Make connections to the answer with your own life.
Support your answers with information from the text.

In the Ontario School Literacy Test, students are required to make connections in reading exercises.
Students should try to make connections between what they read and what they know from their own lives. This gives more meaning to what they read. Making connections is a type of reading strategy that connects information and ideas to personal knowledge and experience.

Key Questions for Students to Ask Themselves:
Do I know anyone who has experienced this? Have I experienced this?
Does this article remind me of anything in my life or in anything else I have ever read?
How did this make me feel?
Why do I feel like this?
Can I draw any comparisons from my own life experience?
Why do I think this is important?

                          How to Answer Multiple Choice Questions
The following is a collection of activities, hints and strategies to help students answer multiple choice questions more successfully. While some of these strategies are somewhat utilitarian in that their sole purpose is to help students answer questions better, many produce "teachable moments" when students can learn in other ways.
Reading
Read the questions carefully. This cannot be emphasized enough.
Read the whole question, the stem and all of the responses. before answering.
Ask yourself what kind of information the question is looking for.
Read all the multiple choice questions before answering any of them. This gets your thinking going and it lets you use information in other questions.
Read all of the stems with all of the options indidually to see how they sound.
Underline important words. Circle key words like "not" and "always".
Translate questions into your own words.

Strategies
Cover the options: Put your hand or a piece of paper over the options. Read the stem then think about about what the answer is. Then look for the correct answer.
Old Faithful: Answer all of the questions that are obvious. Answer other questions by ruling out the wrong answers and choosing between the remaining options. Leave the rest, the most difficult ones, and come back to them later.

Never leave an answer blank (if there are no penalties, and there usually aren't).

Changing Answers
Changing your answers is NOT  a bad thing. It is a myth that changing answers is a bad thing. In fact, answers that are changed are more often correct because time has been spent on carefully considering the answer. Thinl carefully before you make a change.

TRICKS:
If there are opposite answers, one of tthem is probably correct.
If there are two like answers, one of them is probably correct.
Check to see if options fit grammatically with the stem.
Question options that you don't recognize at all.
Change all double negatives to positive and the consider them.
Responses with absolute words (always, never, all, only) are less likely to be correct than responses with conditional words (seldom, some, usually, probably).
The longest response is often correct.
Treat each alternative as a true-false statement and look for the true statement.