Improving Your Reading Score

Many parents want to know the best way to improve their child’s reading score or reading comprehension.  These are two separate issues!  Improving reading comprehension is a nearly lifelong process, including reading a lot of challenging material and strengthening vocabulary.  By the time you reach your junior year, you don’t have much time to work on your reading comprehension.  However, you can improve your SAT or ACT reading score:

1.  Learn a solid reading strategy!  Many students make the mistake of reading the passage first and then doing the questions in order, but this is very inefficient and costs you points.
2. Familiarize yourself with the different question types, such as main idea, author’s tone, inference, graphs/tables, vocabulary, and more. 
3. Know the patterns for right and wrong answers.  For example, an author’s tone is highly unlikely to be extreme or very negative, and vocabulary questions typically use the common definition as a wrong answer trap.  There are many patterns throughout the test that can help you reverse engineer a question and steer clear of the tempting traps.
4. Take lots and lots of practice!  It is important to learn test taking strategies and techniques, but it is equally important to practice these skills on real SATs or ACTs.  You want to be an expert by the time you sit for your exam.

If you’d like to learn more about our test taking techniques, sign up for one of our upcoming classes or one on one tutoring.  See more at lockwoodtestprep.com