Help!!! I've taken it 5 times and have not passed. I know the material like the back of my hand, I am having a hard time applying it to the scenarios and understanding a lot of the questions. ANYTHING that can help would be greatly appreciated. I have spent more money on study guides and practice exams than I have on the tests...that should tell you how much I've invested into studying and preparing.
So you're dealing with literacy acquisition in students from roughly age 4 to age 8, most of whom are going to be following a fairly standard progression from beginning to grasp phonemic awareness through basic phonics and fluency to comprehension and reading to learn. Scorers want to know that you know what aspects of which reading domains are normally taught at what time of year to a kid who's on grade level, that you can tell how far behind grade level a kid is and in what domains, and that you have a good idea how to work with a kid who's ahead of grade level. A scenario question will ask this by presenting a kid or a group of kids and some set of the following bits of information: age, grade, month in grade, reading domain, reading subskill, issues such as language and literacy background and disabilities, reading-related activity and performance on that activity (including mistakes or miscues). Your task is to assemble the clues and then see which of the possible multiple choice answers best fits the scenario and/or the kid(s) in it without being dead wrong about some part of it. (What do I mean by "dead wrong"? If a kid's in second grade, and in the absence of second-language or hearing issues, phonemic awareness is really, really unlikely to be at issue. If a kid's pre-K and on grade level, it's rare to be concerned with spelling rules.) Sometimes the right answer is clearly good, but sometimes it's just that it's mismatched less badly than the other answers. Conversely, a question that poses a technical term or category and/or a reading skill is looking for you to be able to think of the sort of kid for whom, in a given circumstance, that technical term or category or skill is applicable. If the technical terms and activities you know don't make you think of kids at specific stages, let me suggest orienting your study that way. Again, you're hoping for the best-fit answer but willing to settle for the least rotten one.
