Ways to Help Your Child with Test-Taking

• Do encourage your child. Praise them for the things they do well. If they feel good about themselves, they will do their best on a test. Children who are afraid of failing are more likely to become anxious when taking tests and more likely to make mistakes.
• Do make sure your child attends school regularly. Remember, tests reflect children’s overall achievement. The more effort and energy your child puts into learning, the more likely he or she will do well on tests.
• Do provide a quiet, comfortable place for studying at home and make sure that your child is well rested on school days and especially on the day of a test. Children who are tired are less able to pay attention in class or to handle the demands of a test.
• Do make sure your child eats a well-rounded breakfast every morning. A healthy body leads to a healthy, active mind.
• Do provide books and magazines for your child to read. By reading new materials, your child will learn new vocabulary words that might appear on a test. Test makers draw on a wide variety of formats when choosing items to evaluate reading comprehension skills, so students should read fiction, non-fiction, poetry, newspapers, recipes, etc.
• Do limit your child’s TV time. Studies show that children who watched fewer than three hours of television a day scored higher on the national reading test than those who watched more.
• Do help your child avoid test anxiety. It’s good for children to be concerned about taking a test. It’s not good for them to develop “text anxiety.” Test anxiety is worrying too much about doing well on a test. It can mean disaster for your child. Students with test anxiety can worry about success in school. They can become very self-critical and lose confidence in their abilities. Instead of feeling challenged by the prospect of success, they become afraid of failure. To help with test anxiety, help your child to do the following: Plan ahead. Start studying well in advance. Make sure you understand what material the test will cover. Review the material more than once. Don’t “cram” the night before. Get a good night’s sleep.
• Don’t get upset because of a single test score. Test scores are not perfect measures of what a child knows or can do. Also, many things can influence how your child does on a test on any particular day. One test is simply one test.
• Don’t place so much emphasis on children’s test scores that you lose sight of their well being. Too much pressure can affect their test performance. Remember, your love and support should not be conditioned on how well they perform on tests.