Strategy 5

At Fairmont Senior High School, 54.75% of students are at Mastery or above in reading, 57.05% are in math, 40.09% are in science, and 48.70% are in social studies. While it appears that science is the area of serious need, there is a significant discrepancy in the number of students tested in comparison to the other tests. In the data, it states that 197 students were tested in science, while in the other tests the only variant in student testing is that 545 students took the math test, instead of 546 students taking the other two tests. With that being said, social studies is an area of great need in the school.

One recommended instructional intervention for Social Studies is to activate prior knowledge. One method of this is to make predictions. This strategy asks students use text features such as headlines and bold faced terms to make predictions about what the content will be in the textbook.

A video commentary of this from Sue Wimsatt can be found at: http://www.jackson.k12.ky.us/readingstrategies/more/video/wimsatt3fix.htm

My question is, how does the emphasis on prior knowledge and the implementation of the strategy to "make predictions" increase the test scores for Social Studies?

To assess this strategy, you could utilize the long passage essay portions of WestTest preparation materials for Social Studies. First, you would give the students the test as a pre-test. After they learn how to utilize the strategy, a second version of the test could be given (a different test, but the same format). In that sense, the teacher implementing the strategy could see whether the "make predictions" strategy was efficient in raising test scores in their classroom.