Practice makes perfect

I had the day off from The Job and took the practice EC-4 Generalists test at UTD today. The way the practice worked is, after we finished, the test administrator marked down the wrong answers but didn't supply the correct answers to those questions. We then changed our wrong answers and submitted the test again for another checking. This process is meant to help students see if they're on the right track with a troublesome questions and to assess their thinking.

On the first go round, I missed nine out of 100 questions. After going over the incorrect ones, I got only one wrong the second time.

Here are a few of the somewhat unfamiliar concepts that tripped me up on the practice exam (interestingly, they are all literacy-related):

* miscue analysis --- scoring a student's oral reading using an audio recording; differs from a running record in that scoring is done later instead of concurrently
* cloze assessment --- words or parts of words are blocked out in a text; students use context and previous vocabulary knowledge to infer the missing words and complete the passage
* Readers Theater --- choral readings of a prepared script

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So, good for me. I have a social bombshell, but will save it for tomorrow.