Praxis Elementary Education For Dummies
Overview
Increase your chances of scoring higher on the Praxis II Elementary Education test
Contrary to popular belief, the Praxis II Elementary Education test isn't a measure of academic performance, which is why many test-takers who achieve perfect grades in college don't always pass it. Studying such a broad range of topics and enduring such a long testing processing can be challenging, so what's the best way to prepare for it? Turn to Praxis II Elementary Education For Dummies with Online Practice! It offers easy-to-follow subject reviews, test-taking strategies and advice for multiple choice and essay questions, sample practice questions, two full-length practice tests with detailed answers and explanations, and more.
If you're one of the more than 600,000 aspiring teachers who take this test each year, this hands-on, friendly test prep guide gets you
up to speed on everything you need to know to pass the Praxis II Elementary Education text with flying colors. This helpful guide covers Reading and Language Arts, Mathematics, Social Studies, Science, Art, Music, and Physical Education. It leaves no stone unturned by offering tips on registering for the exam, as well as a detailed overview of the test and how it's administered.
- Practice with hundreds of authentic Praxis II questions
- Hone the skills needed to ace the exam and start your career as a licensed teacher
- Boost your confidence and do your best on test day
- Get one year of online access to five Praxis II exams to sharpen your test-taking skills
If you're a future educator gearing up to take the Praxis II Elementary Education test, this is your ultimate guide to one of the most important tests you'll ever take.
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About The Author
Carla C. Kirkland is CEO of The Kirkland Group, a consulting firm providing professional development, technical assistance, and standardized test preparation to schools. Chan Cleveland, Executive Vice President of The Kirkland Group, has created and revised language arts standards for many school districts.
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praxis elementary education for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
The Praxis Elementary Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment exam (5017) covers a broad span of what you need to know regarding elementary education. If you are taking the Praxis Elementary Education: Content Knowledge exam (5018), be aware that it restricts its coverage to the content of the main four subject areas that an elementary teacher should have mastered: reading and language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science.
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Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment exam (5017) uses 120 questions to evaluate your curriculum development, instructional, and assessment abilities in five subject-area groups:
Reading and language arts
Mathematics
Science
Social studies
Art, music, and physical education
The 120 questions of the exam are divided among five subject-area groups according to these proportions:
Test Subject
Approximate Number of Questions
Approximate Percentage of the Exam
Reading and language arts
37
31%
Mathematics
31
26%
Science
20
16%
Social studies
17
14%
Art, music, and physical education
15
13%
In each of the five subject areas, questions are related to relevant national standards and test your knowledge of how to help students develop an understanding of particular areas of knowledge or how to help them acquire and use key skills.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education: Content Knowledge exam (5018) uses 140 questions to evaluate your understanding, application, analysis, and evaluation in four subject-area groups:
Reading and language arts
Mathematics
Science
Social studies
The 140 questions of the exam are divided among four subject-area groups according to these proportions:
Test Subject
Approximate Number of Questions
Approximate Percentage of the Exam
Reading and language arts
49
35%
Mathematics
41
29%
Science
25
18%
Social studies
25
18%
The questions are in sync with state and national standards for English language arts and mathematics, as well as with the content standards for science and social studies.
Praxis
In order to take the Praxis Elementary Education exam, you’ll first need to register for it. You can find out how to register for any of the Praxis Subject Assessments by going to the Educational Testing Service (ETS) website at www.ets.org.These assessments are offered during testing windows at more than 300 testing sites across the country.
Praxis
Sadly, it does happen. Sometimes you study for, prepare for, and focus on the Praxis Elementary Education exam only to receive the bad news that you didn't achieve a passing score.Don't panic, though. According to Educational Testing Service (ETS), you can take the test once per calendar month, although no more than six times within a 12-month period.
Anthropology is the study of humankind. Human culture allows for a wide variety of anthropological study, and so the Praxis Elementary Education exam may contain questions on fields ranging from archeology to primatology to ethnography.An anthropologist can focus on modern culture or prehistoric culture, as well as all the cultures in between.
Praxis
The Science section of the Praxis Elementary Education exam may contain questions about the interaction of energy and matter. There are several ways that energy can interact with matter:
Sound: Waves made by vibration passing through the matter of air. The faster the vibration, the higher the pitch. Shorter (more compressed) wavelengths carry more energy so they vibrate at a higher frequency.
Praxis
The Math section of the Praxis Elementary Education exam may contain a question that requires you to graph the solution to an inequality on a number line.To begin, you put a dot on the number in the solution. If the symbol is > or <, then "or equal to" is not part of the solution, so you use a hollow dot to show that the number is just the boundary of a range of numbers and is not part of it.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education exam will probably include a question that involves transformations—that is, changes in the positions or sizes of shapes. There are four major types of transformations, as you can see here. Transformations.A translation is the moving of a shape from one place to another. A reflection is the forming of a reverse image of a shape in reference to a line, which does not have to be shown.
Praxis
Formulas are often used in math as well as physics and related branches of science. No surprise, then, that you'll be confronted with questions about formulas on the Praxis Elementary Education exam.When a formula or other equation has two variables and one variable is by itself on a side, the variable by itself is generally called the dependent variable.
Praxis
You will need to teach your students how to be active listeners during oral classroom presentations, and so the Praxis Elementary Education exam may contain questions on this topic.There are several considerations for the listener to keep in mind when assessing an oral presentation. To be active listeners, students should be aware of the following, writing down notes during the speech and after as it helps them:
Approach.
Some questions on the Praxis Elementary Education exam will test you on different principles of art, from the aesthetics of art to legal ownership and copyright.For example, one painting may thrill some viewers while offending others; one artist may receive funding while another does not. These responses and choices are part of a culture's aesthetics, how people characterize what is beautiful or in good taste, both emotionally and intellectually.
You will need to know some basic concepts of economics for the Praxis Elementary Education exam. Elementary economics examines the desire for, the manufacture of, and the sale and use of money, both locally and globally.The teaching of economics includes concepts like wants versus needs, costs, and more thought-provoking topics, such as the following:
Natural, human, and capital resources
Supply and demand
Producers and production
Consumers and consumption
Taxation and spending
Inflation and recession
Teaching economic literacy, or the ability to understand how money works in the world, can help students understand how the payment of taxes works to keep roads safe, to repair bridges, and to pay for their schooling, for example.
Praxis
You will probably be tested on figurative language in the Praxis Elementary Education exam. While your students may not use figurative language in their academic writing, they will when writing prose and poetry.Here are some figurative language terms that you should be familiar with for the exam:
Alliteration—Repetition of the initial consonant sounds (for example, such sweet sorrow)
Hyperbole—Exaggeration (for example, my tears could fill an ocean)
Imagery—Descriptions that appeal to the senses
Metaphor—A direct comparison (without the word like or as), such as my love is a rose
Onomatopoeia—Words that sound like what they represent, such as boom or squish
Oxymoron—An apparent contradiction, such as a loud silence
Personification—Giving human qualities to something that isn't human, such as a kind rainfall
Simile—A comparison (weaker than a metaphor) that uses the words like or as, such as my love is like a rose
Symbol—Something used to represent something else
Practice question
During a discussion after reading one of Aesop's fables to first-graders, a teacher asks the students, "Can mice and lions really talk?
The Praxis Elementary Education exam contains questions that test your strategies for helping students develop their fluency in English. These strategies may include using graphic organizers and making inferences.A fluent reader can read a grade-level text with accuracy, quickness, and expression. It is important for readers to have lots of practice and feedback all along (from learning print concepts to phonemes to words) so that they can become fluent readers at their grade level.
Praxis
The Math and Science sections of the Praxis Elementary Education exam contain questions where you will need to be familiar with different forms of measurement.Measurements can be described in various types of units. English system units for distance include inches, feet, yards, and miles. They are based on each other.
Geography helps us understand the Earth and our place on it. Geography questions in the Social Studies section of the Praxis Elementary Education exam cover the following basic geographical ideas:
Physical factors affect cultural factors. In other words, natural resources affect human civilization. Greece developed differently than Russia, in large part because of the different terrain.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education exam will include questions that ask you to interpret data. This data may come in the form of a bar graph, line graph, circle graph, scatterplot, or box plot.Bar graphs are a common and effective form of data presentation. They include bars, which are rectangles that correspond to data that is listed vertically.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education exam covers questions on literature and informational text—that is, fiction and nonfiction. You will therefore need to be familiar with the different genres of writing.The comprehension of text is a process that occurs over time. It is not a destination as much as it is a journey for students in schools.
Praxis
Some questions on the Praxis Elementary Education exam will test your understanding of how to help students develop their comprehension of different elements of music.For example, how does a work of music's texture contribute to the emotion it arouses in listeners? What elements make up a work of music's texture?
Praxis
When you assign opinion essays to your students, you'll be asking them to write about what they think about a particular topic. On the Praxis Elementary Education exam, you'll probably encounter a constructed-response question that will ask you to do the same thing.Opinions are views that we believe to be true; their supporting reasons or claims often include one or more of the following words: think, believe, should, must, good, better, best, worse, worst, more important, most important, of greatest significance.
Praxis
Because students are generally expected to give oral presentations in class, you will probably encounter a question on this topic in the Praxis Elementary Education exam.More formal than group discussion, oral presentations have their own set of rules for the speaker. When giving a classroom presentation, there are several considerations for the speaker to keep in mind:
Audience.
Praxis
On the Praxis Elementary Education exam, you may be asked questions about Earth and the other planets and objects in our solar system. You should also be familiar with how Earth revolves around the sun, and how the moon rotates around Earth.A year is the time it takes Earth to make one revolution around the sun.
When you run into problems on the Praxis Elementary Education exam that involve using the four major math operations—adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing—you can use PEMDAS to solve them.When multiple operations are used in the working of a math problem, there is an order in which the operations must take place.
Praxis
You will probably encounter a question or two that involve phonological awareness on the Praxis Elementary Education exam. Phonological awareness is a broad skill involving sound recognition.Beginning readers start by learning the individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. For example, the word cat has three phonemes: /c/ /a/ /t/.
Praxis
Some questions on the Praxis Elementary Education exam will test your ability to help students exercise and develop physical fitness, game and sports skills, and body management and locomotor skills, as well as develop their knowledge of safety, social discipline, and healthy lifestyles.Physical activity provides children with opportunities to experience pleasure, self-expression, and social interaction.
If you encounter a poetry question on the Praxis Elementary Education exam, it will probably involve rhyme schemes. A rhyme scheme is a pattern to the rhyme that runs throughout a poem.Some poems with rhyme schemes include the following:
Ballad. This often tells a story, is written in quatrains (four lines per stanza), has multiple stanzas, and is meant to be sung.
Praxis
The Reading and Language Arts section of the Praxis Elementary Education exam includes questions on print concepts. This is one of the foundations of literacy that you will have to teach your students. It includes skills such as knowing how letters and words go together to form sentences.When readers are emerging, or just developing, they may see letters and punctuation merely as shapes.
The chances are very good that the Praxis Elementary Education exam will contain one or two questions where you'll have to find the probability of an event.The probability of an event is a ratio that represents the likelihood that it will happen. It is the number of outcomes that qualify as the event divided by the number of possible outcomes.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education exam contains math questions that require you to understand the four major properties of operations: commutative, associative, distributive, and substitution. The commutative and associative properties have versions for both addition and multiplication.When three or more numbers are added, the order in which they are added does not matter.
Praxis
An elementary school teacher needs to be able to identify the different parts of a sentence, as well as different kinds of sentences. For example, questions about sentence structure that will appear on the Praxis Elementary Education exam may require that you know the difference between a subject and a predicate, or a compound and complex sentence.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education exam requires that you be familiar with the stages of writing development in students. Writing development occurs as students' skills evolve, and ranges from making scribbles to show ideas to understanding standard spelling.The stages of writing development are as follows:
Scribbles or drawings.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education exam will usually contain questions about the basic states of matter and how they can be affected by temperature and pressure.Matter is in everything, from rocks to water to air, from mountains to microbes to mist; it comprises all objects and substance—anything that has mass and takes up space is matter.
Praxis
In the Science section of the Praxis Elementary Education exam, you'll probably encounter a question or two about the structure of our home planet, Earth.A cross-section of Earth's interior contains several layers, as shown here. A cross-section of Earth's interior and atmosphere.Deep inside is the inner core, solid and made mostly of iron.
Praxis
Students use common structures to organize their writing, such as cause and effect, chronological, and compare and contract. The Praxis Elementary Education exam will require that you be familiar with these structures.The following list contains some common structures, when they are used, and linking words that are often used with them.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment exam (5017) covers a broad span of what you need to know regarding elementary education. If you are taking the Praxis Elementary Education: Content Knowledge exam (5018), be aware that it restricts its coverage to the content of the main four subject areas that an elementary teacher should have mastered: reading and language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science.
Praxis
The Praxis Elementary Education exam contains questions on teaching phonics and helping students to recognize words. You'll be tested on your familiarity with techniques such as shared reading, instant recognition, and running records.When readers can look at a printed word and say it out loud, they are decoding it.
Praxis
When you take the Praxis Elementary Education exam, it’s important to pace yourself. You can have a mastery of all the necessary content, but without appropriate timing strategies, your score can suffer greatly. Knowing how much time to spend on the questions is an asset to test-taking.
Review the specific timing for your test and then the general strategies that follow.
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