Skip to main content

Study Guide

Sample Selected-Response Questions
Field 46: Reading Endorsement K–8

Practice Questions

Expand All | Collapse All

Subarea I–Theoretical and Research Foundations

Objective 0001: Understand linguistic foundations of language and literacy.

1. In Ehri's model of word-reading development (1994, 1996), which of the following characteristics distinguishes readers who are in the orthographic phase of word reading?

  1. primary reliance on sounding out letters and blending to pronounce unfamiliar words
  2. frequent errors identifying words with high-frequency spelling patterns
  3. primary reliance on context for identifying unfamiliar words in continuous text
  4. recognition of word parts and syllable chunks in multisyllabic words
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: D.
Objective 0001: Understand linguistic foundations of language and literacy.

2. Which of the following common English morphemes is a derivational morpheme that is typically taught in the context of instruction in structural analysis?

  1. –ing
  2. –s
  3. –ed
  4. –ful
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: D.
Objective 0002: Understand neurological, cognitive, and sociocultural foundations of language and literacy.

3. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) confirms that skilled and dyslexic readers in all languages and of all ages activate different regions of the brain during reading. Longitudinal studies further indicate that, as children get older, skilled readers continue to activate the same brain region during reading, while dyslexic readers increasingly activate other brain regions. Which of the following conclusions about the nature of dyslexia can best be drawn based on these patterns of brain activation?

  1. The development of neural connections in other parts of the brain eradicates dyslexia.
  2. Children tend to outgrow dyslexia naturally as the brain matures.
  3. The onset of dyslexia is closely and consistently associated with specific environmental factors.
  4. Dyslexia is neurobiological in origin and persistent if untreated.
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: D.

 

Subarea II–Assessment, Instruction, and Leadership Foundations

Objective 0003: Understand foundations of literacy assessment.

4. A reading teacher develops individual literacy profiles for each student that include standardized test scores, results of screening and diagnostic assessments, and representative work samples. This type of tool is most appropriate to use for which of the following assessment purposes?

  1. evaluating the alignment of a student's intervention plan with grade-level literacy standards
  2. preparing a detailed analysis of a student's development in multiple dimensions of literacy
  3. measuring the effect of specific interventions on a student's achievement of literacy standards
  4. determining a student's rate of progress toward achieving long-term literacy goals
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: B.
Objective 0004: Understand foundations of literacy instruction and intervention.

5. Which of the following procedures would best ensure the effectiveness of a school's early intervention program, such as a Response to Intervention (RTI) program?

  1. inviting stakeholders to submit anonymous summative evaluations of the program to the public education agency
  2. providing parents/guardians with information about the program and how they can supplement it at home
  3. making continual modifications to the program to accommodate participant teachers' instructional styles
  4. establishing specific criteria to define fidelity of implementation for each component of the program
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: D.
Objective 0004: Understand foundations of literacy instruction and intervention.

6. In a middle school that follows an effective, evidence-based Response to Intervention (RTI) program, differentiated instruction should take place in which of the following instructional settings?

  1. in general education classes only
  2. in both general education classes and reading intervention classes
  3. in reading intervention classes only
  4. in general education classes in grade 6 and reading intervention classes in grades 7 and 8
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: B.
Objective 0005: Understand foundations of leadership in reading and literacy.

7. A reading teacher serves, with other teachers, administrators, and parents in a school district, on a committee charged with implementation of an initiative designed to enhance students' academic-language development. Which of the following strategies for including the school's faculty in the development of the implementation plan would be most likely to promote the effectiveness of this initiative?

  1. asking teachers to keep detailed records regarding how they implement the initiative in their classrooms
  2. explaining the rationale for the initiative and eliciting teachers' input about applying the plan to their age level and content area
  3. ensuring that teachers include training related to the initiative in their professional development plans
  4. distributing manuals about the initiative to teachers and offering hands-on training in applying the initiative to particular content areas
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: B.

 

Subarea III–Literacy Assessment in Grades K–8

Objective 0006: Understand the selection and administration of assessments in essential elements of literacy in grades K–8.

8. Which of the following assessment procedures would be most effective for measuring an emergent reader's skill in applying the alphabetic principle?

  1. asking a student to say as many words as possible that rhyme with a spoken target word and counting the words produced in a short period
  2. asking a student to say the letter names in a series of familiar written words and calculating the percent correctly named
  3. asking a student to read a series of written nonsense words and counting the letter sounds correctly pronounced in a given time
  4. asking a student to identify the letters presented in random order on printed cards and calculating the percent correctly identified
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: C.
Objective 0006: Understand the selection and administration of assessments in essential elements of literacy in grades K–8.

9. After conducting an oral reading fluency test using a grade-level curriculum-based text, a reading teacher calculates and notes in the student's record the number of words correct per minute in the student's performance. Which of the following additional measures would be most important to note in the record for this assessment?

  1. the number of words the student repeated when reading the passage
  2. the percentage of multisyllabic words in the passage
  3. the average number of words per sentence in the passage
  4. the percentage of words in the passage the student read accurately
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: D.
Objective 0007: Understand how to interpret the results of various literacy assessments and to use assessment data to plan appropriate instruction and interventions for K–8 students.

10. The most advanced phonologicalawareness skill a first-grade student demonstrates on an informal diagnostic assessment is the ability to detect beginning sounds in familiar words. In keeping with the research-based sequences within the phonological-awareness continuum, this result suggests that ongoing instruction for this student should focus next on which of the following skills?

  1. detecting ending sounds in words
  2. substituting beginning sounds in words
  3. segmenting words into syllables
  4. blending a series of phonemes into words
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: A.

 

Subarea IV–Essential Elements of K–8 Literacy Instruction and Intervention

Objective 0008: Understand instruction and intervention in phonological awareness and phonemic awareness and other important emergent literacy skills, including concepts of print and letter recognition and formation.

11. When introducing a new vocabulary word to a small group of fifth-grade students in an intensive intervention class, a reading teacher first carefully pronounces the word syllable by syllable and then helps the students slowly say the whole word several times, following the teacher's model. This practice benefits students primarily by:

  1. developing their word consciousness.
  2. promoting their phonological awareness with respect to the word.
  3. enhancing their understanding of the word's spelling pattern.
  4. providing them with multiple meaningful exposures to the word.
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: B.
Objective 0009: Understand instruction and intervention in phonics and other word identification skills.

12. Several second-grade students inconsistently read some words ending in -ing, correctly identifying these words only some of the time. For example, a student sometimes reads the word hoping as "hopping," and the word fitting as "fighting." The teacher asks a reading coach for help in developing an appropriate instructional intervention for the students. Which of the following interventions would best address the students' demonstrated needs?

  1. using spelling sorts that focus on the targeted spelling pattern
  2. teaching the students a mnemonic to help them remember the relevant orthographic rule
  3. adding the inflected words to the students' individual spelling lists
  4. using repeated reading with texts that include words with the targeted spelling pattern
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: A.
Objective 0010: Understand instruction and intervention in vocabulary and academic language.

13. A reading coach trains elementary teachers to use paragraph frames for scaffolding students' writing about informational texts. One of the paragraph frames discussed by the coach is shown below.

blank and blank are both examples of blank , but they are different in important ways. First of all, blank . Secondly, blank . Finally, blank .

This approach to helping students organize their ideas in writing also benefits student's ongoing content-area reading development in which of the following ways?

  1. by improving their automaticity reading general academic vocabulary
  2. by increasing their motivation to read nonfiction texts independently
  3. by expanding their repertoire of strategies for identifying unfamiliar words in print
  4. by enhancing their knowledge of syntactic structures
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: D.
Objective 0011: Understand instruction and intervention in fluency.

14. A third-grade student reads a grade-level passage accurately and slowly, pausing before sounding out some of the longer words in the text. Afterward, the student has difficulty answering literal comprehension questions about the passage. Which of the following factors is likely the primary cause of the student's disfluency?

  1. inattentive or careless decoding
  2. lack of automaticity
  3. limited oral vocabulary knowledge
  4. gaps in phonics knowledge
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: B.
Objective 0012: Understand instruction and intervention in reading comprehension and comprehension strategies.

15. A reading teacher is working with a small group of fourth-grade students. The teacher has the students take turns reading aloud the sentences shown below.

  1. The only way to cool off was to jump in the pool.
  2. I tried to go barefoot, but I burned my toes.
  3. It was the hottest day of the whole summer.
  4. My grandpa said you could fry an egg on the pavement.
  5. The ice melted in my lemonade right away.

Then the teacher asks, "Which sentence tells about all of the others?" and models how to answer this question. Next, the teacher gives students a similar list of sentences and asks the same question. Participating in this type of activity is likely to promote students' reading comprehension in which of the following ways?

  1. by prompting students to activate their prior knowledge before reading an unfamiliar passage
  2. by helping students determine the main idea in a passage
  3. by encouraging students to make predictions about a text while they are reading
  4. by teaching students to use a graphic organizer to take notes on a text
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: B.
Objective 0013: Understand instruction and intervention in spelling and writing.

16. A reading teacher regularly asks a fourth-grade student to write short descriptions of specific story elements after reading narrative texts. A representative sample of one of the descriptions is shown below.

The wolf was brown and gray. The wolf was big. The wolf was hungry.

The teacher would like to improve the student's sentence fluency. Which of the following strategies would likely be most effective for this purpose?

  1. prompting the student to think of words that could substitute for big and hungry in these sentences
  2. providing the student with explicit instruction in techniques for combining sentences
  3. asking the student to write additional sentences about the wolf as part of the description
  4. having the student read the sentences aloud, emphasizing different words each time
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: B.
Objective 0013: Understand instruction and intervention in spelling and writing.

17. Which of the following guidelines is most appropriate to use when planning an intervention to improve a student's accurate spelling of words with Greek combining forms and Latin roots?

  1. Words most commonly used in the sciences should be introduced first.
  2. Students should be encouraged to memorize the letter sequences in the words without attending to letter-sound correspondences in English.
  3. Words with the same etymology should be taught together.
  4. Students should have already mastered the meaning of the words before instruction in spelling the words begins.
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: C.

 

Subarea V–Content-Area Literacy in Grades K–8

Objective 0014: Understand content-area texts and instruction and intervention in comprehension of content-area texts.

18. A reading teacher is selecting supplemental content-specific texts to promote the background knowledge and content-specific vocabulary of students who are struggling readers. Which of the following types of text would be most appropriate for this purpose?

  1. offline and online reference materials, such as word lists and glossaries from content-area textbooks, children's encyclopedias, and topic-oriented Web sites
  2. authentic texts related to the topic, including excerpts from academic journals and technical texts
  3. controlled texts about the topic in which key terms appear multiple times and words that appear only once are sight words or regular one-syllable words
  4. challenging informational texts related to the topic that include an abundance of pictorial and graphic elements
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: C.
Objective 0014: Understand content-area texts and instruction and intervention in comprehension of content-area texts.

19. Read the passage below from an informational text; then answer the question that follows.

The process of making silk was developed in China around 2700 B.C.E. The process of manufacture and even the origin of the fiber—threads collected from the cocoons of silkworms—was kept secret by the Chinese for thousands of years. The fine cloth, however, eventually made its way out of China and became known and admired in many parts of the world. As demand for the cloth grew, the silk trade blossomed, and an important new trade route linking China with Central Asia and Europe was established.

The paragraph above exemplifies which of the following organizational patterns?

  1. comparison and contrast
  2. definition
  3. chronological order
  4. classification
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: C.
Objective 0015: Understand reading and writing as tools for content learning.

20. A reading teacher is planning targeted instruction to promote the study skills of a seventh-grade student who demonstrates comprehension of content-area reading materials but has significant difficulty using independent reading assignments to learn new content. Providing the student with explicit instruction and guided practice in which of the following comprehension strategies would be most appropriate to address this student's needs?

  1. using manipulatives
  2. predicting and verifying predictions
  3. self-questioning
  4. paraphrasing and summarizing
Enter to expand or collapse answer. Answer expanded
Correct Response: D.