The Gold Standard In Test Preparation
MASTERING OHIO’S GRADE 4 SOCIAL STUDIES TEST
SKU: 299N
Price: $15.95
The book is arranged by units, covering the three reporting categories -- history, government and geography/economics -- that will be tested.
★▋Highly focused content summaries in each of the 24 chapters provide the most essential information your students will need for each Content Statement.
★▋All of the fundamental social studies skills required by the new curriculum are introduced in this book.
★▋A Unit Pre-Test allows you to see what your students already know. A Unit Test then allows you to assess what your students have learned.
★▋Every page in the book is perforated, allowing students to easily remove pages to hand in or to exchange with other students in class.
★▋The book is based on the principles of the National Research Council’s How People Learn, the methodologies in Robert Marzano’s Classroom Instruction that Works, and Janet Allen’s Tools for Teaching Content Literacy, which provides winning strategies for teaching content-area literacy. In short, every chapter is designed to help your students perform their very best on the test.
CONTENT STATEMENTS
Each chapter begins by identifying one of the tested social studies standards, also known as “Content Statements.” These Content Statements identify what the Ohio Department of Education wants students to know.
KEY NAMES, WORDS, AND PHRASES
It is essential that your students be able to recognize the specialized vocabulary of social studies. This section of the chapter identifies the key names, words, and phrases they need to know.
WHAT YOU ARE EXPECTED TO ACHIEVE
Here students will see a list of the skills they will be expected to perform after they have completed the chapter.
THE MAIN IDEAS
In the “main ideas” section of each chapter, students will find a student-friendly text to show them what they need to know.
STUDY CARDS
In each chapter, students will find a series of study cards. These cards identify the chapter’s most essential content information. These study cards are to be filled out by the students themselves, which will further assist them in assimilating this information. The reverse of each card contains a printed prompt. Students are instructed to cut out these study cards and use them for study and practice. When students review these cards, they will be able to look at the prompt to test their memories.
CONTENT-AREA VOCABULARY
These special content-area vocabulary sections are based on Janet Allen’s pioneering work, Tools for Teaching Content Literacy. These sections provide a variety of exercises to familiarize students with the key vocabulary found in the social studies content statements, including concept ladders, Frayer Models, concept circles, and categorization exercises.
SKILL BUILDERS
Some of the questions on the Grade 4 Social Studies Test will ask your students to interpret a piece of data. Knowing how to interpret different types of data is therefore crucial for your students to perform their best on the test. Throughout this book, students will find special “Skill Builder” sections that focus on how to read, understand and interpret a variety of data. These types of data include charts, tables, graphs, pictures, and illustrations.
PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS
The first part of Ohio’s new Grade 4 Social Studies Summative Assessment will be the Performance-Based Assessment, or “PBA.” These will be hand-scored graphic-response and constructedresponse assessment items. Each chapter of this book has a section devoted to answering PBA-type constructed-response and graphic-response questions. Each of the questions in the book mirrors what students will find when they take the actual test. Although this is a printed book and not a computer program, the exercises that students answer are analogous to the questions on the test.
END-OF-YEAR ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS
The second part of the new summative test will be the machine-scored End-of-Year Assessment, or “EOY.” The type of questions found on the EOY test will consist of short-answer, graphic response, and multiple-choice questions. Your students will find a multitude of these types of questions in every chapter of this book. These questions closely mirror what is on the actual test. As your students grow more skilled at answering a variety of PBA and EOY questions, they will gain confidence in their ability to do well on the test.
UNIT PRE-TESTS
Each unit in this book -- geography, history, government and economics -- opens with a pre-test. Educational research shows that practice with tests of varying scale and intensity can deepen student learning. Taking a test is a threefold mental process: thinking of the sought-after information; bringing it consciously to mind; and finally, storing it. The newly stored memory will be embedded in a host of additional associations, making it easier for students to recall when they face a similar question on the test.
UNIT TESTS
Each of the four units concludes with a comprehensive test on the material explored in that unit. This motivates your students to conduct a thorough review of each unit. By obtaining greater familiarity with different types of test questions that might appear on the test, students will gain greater confidence in approaching the standardized test. In addition, quotations, data and excerpts from longer documents are included in many of the questions throughout the book.
A COMPLETE PRACTICE PERFORMANCE-BASED ASSESSMENT
Everyone expects the new Grade 4 social studies test to be challenging. You can help your sixth graders perform their best by providing them with extensive practice with the test format and by a thorough review of the course content. Our final practice test will give them practice covering the entire course. The PBA-type questions on this final are at the same level and complexity as the questions students will find on the actual assessment.
