RICA Prep

A sixth grader who is advanced in most areas of reading has difficulty completing assigned reading selections. He appears motivated when he begins reading, but he has difficulty keeping his attention on the task at hand. Which of the following would be his teacher's best initial strategy for addressing this difficulty?

When creating lesson plans to promote specific reading skills, a teacher should make sure that:

An early elementary teacher could most effectively support at-home reading by:

A sixth-grade teacher wants to ensure that the classroom reading environment supports content-area learning for the English Learners in the class. Which of the following strategies is likely to be most effective in addressing this objective?

Of the following questions, which would be most important for a teacher to consider when interpreting the results of a reading assessment for a particular student?

A fourth-grade class includes two students with Individualized Education Programs(IEPs). When planning classroom entry level and progress-monitoring assessmentsfor these students, the teacher should:

A middle school teacher is preparing for the class to take the sixth-grade CaliforniaStandards Test (CST) in English-language arts. The teacher believes that a student in the class with a Section 504 Plan would perform significantly better on the assessment if she were allowed to have frequent supervised breaks within sections of the test. Which of the following guidelines would be most important for the teacher to follow to ensure that arrangements for this student during the test are appropriate

Midway through the year, a second-grade teacher convenes a student success team to plan additional support for a student who is performing somewhat below grade-level standards in reading. Other members of the team include the student and her parents, another teacher who works closely with the student, and a school administrator. In the context of developing an improvement plan for the student, which of the following pieces of information would be most importantfor the teacher to communicate to the success team?

A kindergarten teacher plays the following game with students. The teacher says,"Guess whose name I'm going to say now?" The teacher then says the initial sound of a student's name (e.g., /m/ for Mariko), and the children try to guess the name. This activity is likely to promote the reading development of students primarily by helping them:

Which of the following informal assessments would be most appropriate to use to assess an individual student's phonemic awareness?

A kindergarten teacher is preparing astudent for a phonemic awareness assessment.
Teacher: What is this a picture of? [The teacher displays apicture of a boat.]
Student: A boat?
Teacher: A boat, that's right. Now let's say the word boat together very slowly:/b/.../ō/.../t/. [The studentpronounces the word with the teacher.]
Teacher: How many sounds do you hear? /b/.../ō/.../t/ . . . [The teacher slowly repeats the word.]
Student: Three?
Teacher: That's right, three. Now, I'd like you to do this for some more words.
This assessment would be an appropriateway to test the student's ability to perform which of the following phonemic awareness tasks?

The use of rhyming texts for kindergarten read-alouds is likely to promote the reading development of kindergarten students primarily by:

Which of the following strategies would best help a kindergarten student who is having difficulty visually distinguishing between the letters b and d?

A first grader can identify the letters of the alphabet and decode a number of simple words. He becomes confused, however, when tracking print in consecutive lines of print. Which of the following strategiesis likely to be most effective in helping the student read a short paragraph of simple text?

Which of the following instructional practices would be most effective in promoting kindergarten students' understanding of the alphabetic principle?

An emergent reader frequently reverses some letters and numbers during writing tasks. Which of the following strategies would be most effective in helping this student develop more accurate letter formation skills?

In the word chimpanzee, which of the following pairs of letters is a digraph?

A kindergarten student has demonstrated the ability to write words phonetically, but she is reluctant to write because she is worried about misspelling words. The teacher could best promote the student's reading and writing development by:

During which of the following stages of spelling development do students typically begin to show an understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds?

Function words such as to, the, and of are most appropriately taught in the context of which of the following areas of reading instruction?

A first-grade teacher provides students with explicit, systematic phonics instruction to promote their reading development. When designing activities to teach letter-sound correspondences, the teacher should:

Early in the school year, a first-grade teacher wants to conduct an assessment of students' ability to read grade appropriate words, including phonetically regular words and high-frequency irregular sight words. Which of the following informal assessments would be most appropriate and effective for this purpose?

Several first graders have mastered sounding out and blending words that follow simple short-vowel phonics patterns. Their teacher would like to help them begin to develop whole-word reading (i.e., automatic word recognition) of words that follow these patterns. Which of the following instructional approaches would be most effective for this purpose?

When reading aloud texts, a second-grade English Learner often makes errors in pronunciation that are unrelated to her ability to accurately decode the words. The teacher's best response would be to:

Which of the following approaches would be most effective in helping first-grade students who have the prerequisitede coding skills learn to decode words that end in the inflectional morpheme -ing?

An eighth-grade teacher wants to help students improve their spelling of scientific vocabulary, including the terms listed below.
barometer
centimeter
dehydrate
hydrogen
microscope
telescope
thermal
thermometer
Which of the following instructional strategies is likely to be most effective for this purpose?

A sixth-grade teacher observes that several students have misspelled the word pasteurize. After writing pasteurize and Louis Pasteur on the board, the teacher explains how Pasteur invented the processof pasteurization. Students then discuss how the word Pasteur relates to the word pasteurize. This instructional activity fosters students' reading and writing development primarily by:

A third-grade student who is an advanced learner has already demonstrated mastery of the derivational suffixes -ness and -ment, which will be the focus of an upcoming whole-class decoding and spelling lesson. Which of the following strategies for differentiating instruction for this lesson would be most appropriate for this student

Which of the following word pairs are homophones?

A second-grade teacher would like to include independent silent reading as one of several approaches used to promote students' fluency development. When planning differentiated fluency instruction for individual students in the class, the teacher should keep in mind that using independent silent reading to promote fluency:

A fourth-grade student who reads grade level narrative texts with fluency and excellent comprehension is struggling to read aloud a grade-level content-area passage about a topic with which the student is familiar. The student reads the passage hesitantly, frequently stopping to reread clauses or entire sentences. Afterward, the student demonstrates limited comprehension of what was read.Which of the following factors is most likely disrupting the student's fluent reading of this text?

Which of the following instructional activities would best help upper elementary English Learners develop intonations and rhythms of the English language to support fluent reading?

A second-grade teacher would like to plan an activity to improve the reading rate of two students who read at about the same rate and level and are both automatic readers. Which of the following activities would best address the students' needs?

A second grader has demonstrated the ability to decode individual words accurately, but she reads very slowly and laboriously. When the teacher tries to engage the student in oral reading activities, she says she feels "embarrassed" and would rather read silently. Which of the following modifications to instruction would be most appropriate and effective for helping this student improve her reading fluency?

Based on the student's reading performance on this (not listed here) assessment, instruction to increase the student's reading fluency should focus primarily on:

When reading the last sentence of the passage, the student pronounces the word imagine as [ĭm mā' jīn]. Evidence from this assessment best supports which of the following interpretations of this word reading error?

Lately, when choosing a book to read, a third grader who reads at grade level always selects books from a series that is written in a very formulaic style that does little to extend his conceptual or language development. The teacher's best response to this behavior would be to:

A second-grade student has limited vocabulary knowledge, which hinders the student's word recognition and reading comprehension. The student's oral reading is slow and labored, and the student typically spends the majority of independent reading time browsing through books, making little effort to read the actual words on the page. Research has shown that which of the following is most likely to happen if this student receives no instructional intervention?

Which of the following statements best explains an important limitation of teaching students to rely on context as their primary strategy for determining the meaning of unfamiliar words in texts?

A fifth-grade teacher is planning a multi disciplinary unit on water pollution. For this unit, students will read chapters from their social studies and science textbooks as well as relevant fictional narratives. These materials will also be incorporated into a variety of instructional activities designed to promote students' reading development. Which of the following statements best describes an important advantage of using a crosscurricular approach such as this unit to promote students' reading development?

A middle school teacher writes the morpheme dict on the board, pronounces it, and explains that dict derives from the Latin word for "speak."
The teacher then asks students if they can think of English words that start with or include dict. The teacher uses the students' suggestions to create the diagram shown below..
This activity is likely to promote students' vocabulary development primarily by helping the students:

A teacher substitutes blank spaces for several nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in an appropriate level text and asks students to determine reasonable and logical words to complete each blank. This technique is useful as an informal assessment of students' understanding of English language structures primarily because it requires them to:

A fifth-grade teacher gives students the following sentence:

Neither walking on the beach nor running around the track cheered Ahmed up.

The teacher asks the students how the phrases that come just after neither and just after nor are similar. This exercise can promote students' reading comprehension by helping them:

A middle school teacher designs an instructional activity in which students combine several sentences to form a single sentence, as illustrated below.

Combine: Matthew stood and waited for the bus. The sun was blazing hot. Matthew fanned himself with the newspaper.

Single sentence: Waiting for the bus, Matthew stood in the blazing sun, fanning himself with the newspaper. This activity is likely to be most effective in helping students:

Structural analysis would be the most appropriate strategy for a student to use to determine the meaning of which of the following words?

A sixth-grade teacher reads his students the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll. The first four lines of the poem are shown below.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe

The teacher reads aloud the clause "Allmimsy were the borogoves" and asks students what that might mean. One student responds, "It means that the borogoves were all mimsy!" This student's response demonstrates skillin which of the following reading comprehension strategies?

The teacher plans a variety of activities related to "Jabberwocky."Students will work in pairs to make up definitions for some of the nonsense words (e.g., slithy). They will read the poem aloud using tone of voice to express various moods. Finally, they will create their own nonsense poems and give oralreadings of them. These activities aremost likely to promote students' reading development by:

One student pronounces gyre with a hard g sound, while his classmate uses a soft g sound. They ask the teacher who is correct. The teacher's best response would be to:

The teacher asks the students if they can tell which of the nonsense words in the poem are nouns. One student says that toves is a noun. Another says that wabe and borogoves are nouns and adds that gyre and gimble are verbs. The class then discusses how students were able to draw these conclusions. This exercise would be especially useful for helping students understand that:

A sixth-grade class that includes several English Learners has been studying volcanoes. The teacher designs the following paragraph-building activity as part of a chapter review toward the end of the unit.
Step 1: The teacher leads a brief whole-class discussion reviewing key topics covered by the textbook chapter. Step 2: Students form heterogeneous cooperative learning groups with three or four students in each group. Each of the students selects one of the key topics reviewed during the discussion.
Step 3: Individual students write one or two sentences about their topic on sentence strips.
Step 4: The members of the group then decide how to put the various sentences together, editing the sentences as necessary to form a comprehensible paragraph about the chapter and correcting any errors in grammar or spelling.
After participating in this activity, all of the students review the chapter in their science text about volcanoes.

The paragraph-building activity described is likely to promote students' reading development primarily by helping them:

After assessing the effectiveness of this activity, the teacher decides to include an additional step.
For step 5, the teacherwill guide students to develop topics entences for the paragraphs they generated. This modification is most likely to promote students' reading development by:

Which of the following best describes one important way in which this activity is likely to benefit English Learners?

To promote students' comprehension of a passage about comets and meteoroids, a middle school teacher shows the students how to use facts from the text to complete the following Venn diagram. This comprehension strategy is most effective in facilitating students' ability to:

An eighth-grade class will be reading a drama that is a challenging grade-level text. The teacher is concerned that a student in the class who has a reading disability will have difficulty keeping up with and understanding the reading assignments. Which of the following strategies would be most effective for the teacher to use to promote the student's access to the text and his ability to participate fully in class discussions related to it?

A first-grade teacher plans to assess a student's comprehension of a short story through oral retelling. After the student silently reads the story, the teacher will prompt the student's retelling by asking open-ended questions. To prepare for this assessment, the teacher reads the story carefully and composes the questions. Which of the following additional steps would be most helpful for the teacher to take before the retelling activity begins?

A fifth-grade teacher is teaching a unit on fiction. To begin, students read several simple fairy tales and discuss the moral or meaning of each one. The teacher then assigns a more complex story and leads a discussion about the moral of the story after students finish reading it. Thisinstructional strategy is most likely to promote students' reading proficiency by:

A third-grade teacher prepares several poster-sized copies of the star diagram. After reading an assigned story, students divide into small groups, and the teacher distributes a copy of the star diagram to each group. The members of each group discuss how the six questions (who, what,when, where, why, and how) apply to the story and write answers in the six points of the star. The teacher then displays the completed star diagrams and leads a whole-class discussion about them. This instructional activity is most likely to promote students' reading proficiency in which of the following ways?

A sixth-grade teacher has students read a short expository text. After the students finish reading the text, the teacher uses guided discussion to help them complete the form shown below.

Topic of the text:

Author's thesis about the topic:

Evidence presented by the author:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5
Is this evidence factual and/or reasonable?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5
This writing activity promotes students'comprehension and analysis of expositorytexts primarily by:

Creating such a web is likely to promote students' ability to retain and use information they read about a topic by

After giving each student a copy of the web developed by the class, the teacher could best help students make use of the web to learn and retain facts from their reading by asking them to: