3 Key-Exam Prep Strategies to Add to Your Teaching Toolkit
- bellabrunke
- Mar 24
- 3 min read
Preparing students for exam season doesn’t have to be a pain, and it doesn’t have to mean a complete re-tooling of your lesson plans either. If anything, exam prep should build on skills that students are already familiar with, just with a little extra emphasis.
Test-Taking Skills/Strategies
Some of the most essential skills for exam season are actually unrelated to the exam content. These would be skills and strategies to conquer standardized testing, and to facilitate students with the best chances of achieving that high score. Some tutors may feel overwhelmed by the amount of content they need to prepare, and forget that test-taking strategies themselves are just as important.
The Process of Elimination
This is a classic and essential skill to teach to students. Some may have heard it before but not fully understand how to properly utilize it, so it is important to still go over and teach. The process of elimination is meant to help speed up the process of answering questions by quickly eliminating answers that are absolutely not true. If a student is stuck and absolutely not sure what the answer could be, they should employ this tactic to narrow down their guessing field. This tactic is meant to try and improve the guessing process, and to be sure students don’t get stuck on just one question.
Pacing
For many, the time limit will be an overbearing element of the testing process. Encouraging and teaching students to not get hung up on questions is essential. In regular tests, students can spend time on questions and aim to get all of them completed. However, in standardized testing a student wants to answer every question to their best of their ability, and not get stuck. Process of elimination is essential, but also knowing when to skip questions to press on. Teaching students to skip a question that gives them trouble and then return to it when they have finished answering all the questions is an ideal strategy. This allows students to answer as many questions as possible while also giving them an opportunity to circle back at the end, and see what they have missed.
Essay Writing
Another fixture of standardized testing that gives students trouble, but it really doesn’t have to! Strategies can be applied to essays in the same way that they can to multiple-choice questions. Teaching students how to format their essays in the simplest way: introduction, first-point paragraph, second point paragraph, and conclusion. Students should make notes when they read through the question and spend 5-10 minutes plotting out their essay using the approved formatting formatting. That way when they start writing they have a general idea of where the essay is going to go. Annotating the essay question is also effective, understanding what exactly the question is asking of the student will allow the student to more effectively respond. Have students practice writing essays extensively and often, so that they get comfortable and don’t freeze up on the big day.
Employ strategies when reviewing content to maximize the lesson time, and to best prepare students. Engagement is essential. Small quizzes, memory games, and flashcards are essential to providing students with a refresher of the content. Use lesson data to analyze what students struggle on the most throughout the past lessons and bring in a newfound emphasis on these. If students are already strong in certain aspects there’s no point in spending large amounts of time reviewing these.
Overall, boost student confidence. If students go into exam season feeling confident and supported by their tutor, they will perform better in exams. With strong preparation and a confidence boost, students will ace exam season!
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