Foundations Study

Question 1

Which of the following tasks requires the most advanced level of skill along the phonological awareness continuum?

Answer 1

orally segmenting the phonemes in the word chimp and then substituting /ŏ/ for /ĭ/ to make a new word, chomp

Question 2

A kindergarten teacher engages a small group of children in the following Say It and Move It activity.
* The teacher says a two-phoneme word slowly (e.g., ape, bee, day, eat, go, she, toe).
* The children slowly repeat the word.
* The children move a plain wooden block as they say each phoneme, lining up the two blocks from left to right.
Once the children demonstrate mastery of this activity, which of the following strategies would be most appropriate for the teacher to use next to build the children’s phonemic awareness?

Answer 2

displaying pictures for a pair of two- and three-phoneme words that differ by a single phoneme (e.g., toe, toad) and having the children complete the Say It and Move It activity for each word in the pair

Question 3

Use the table below to answer the question that follows.
Line 1 though 2; Line 2 best 3; Line 3 fresh 5; Line 4 4 scratch 6
In which line in the table is a word accurately matched to the number of phonemes the word contains?

Answer 3

Line 1

Question 4

A kindergarten teacher is reading a big book to a group of children. The teacher periodically points to the beginning consonant of selected words and accentuates its initial phoneme as the teacher reads the word aloud. The teacher’s practice is most likely to reinforce the children’s:

Answer 4

awareness of letter-sound correspondences.

Question 5

Which of the following principles is best illustrated by the words watched, wanted, and warned?

Answer 5

The spelling of a suffix is often more reliable than its pronunciation.

Question 6

A first-grade teacher administers a spelling assessment midway through the school year. Afterward, the teacher analyzes students’ spelling errors and categorizes the errors according to their most likely cause.
Phonemic Awareness—The spelling error indicates difficulty perceiving all the sounds in words. Code—The spelling error indicates a code-based difficulty (i.e., mastery of specific
phonics/morphemic elements and associated orthographic patterns).
Several students in the class make spelling errors that primarily fall under the category of phonemic awareness. The students’ spelling development would benefit most from an intervention focused on promoting their ability to apply which of the following foundational skills?

Answer 6

segmenting sequentially all the phonemes that make up a spoken word

Question 7

In the years since the report by the National Reading Panel (2000) was published, evidence- based research has conclusively documented that which of the following phonics approaches is most effective in promoting beginning readers’ reading and spelling development?

Answer 7

focusing on grapheme-phoneme correspondences, in which students are taught explicitly to sound out each letter or letter combination in a word and blend the letter-sounds together

Question 8

Which of the following sentences contains a pair of italicized words that differ from each other by one phoneme?

Answer 8

He took off his cap before he lay down to take a nap.

Question 9

Use the table below to answer the question that follows.

Phonics Term: Example Word
Line 1: l-controlled vowel; real
Line 2: consonant trigraph; scratch
Line 3: vowel team; stir
Line 4: consonant blend; mistake

In which line in the table is the underlined portion of an example word accurately matched to the term that is used to describe that phonics element?

Answer 9

Line 2

Question 10

A second-grade teacher regularly reviews spelling patterns previously taught. The teacher also provides students with multiple opportunities to read and write connected text that features words containing the spelling patterns and to engage in word sorts comparing new and previously taught spelling patterns. These types of instructional activities are likely to promote students’ reading skills primarily by developing their:

Answer 10

accuracy and automaticity reading words that follow the target phonics patterns.

Question 11

Which of the following principles is best illustrated by the words watched, wanted, and warned?

Answer 11

The spelling of a suffix is often more reliable than its pronunciation.

Question 12

A group of first-grade students has mastered reading single-syllable words that follow the closed- syllable patterns VC, CVC, CVCC, and CCVC. The teacher would like to expand students’ reading development by teaching them how to read two-syllable words that consist of closed syllables, such as picnic, muffin, trumpet, pretzel, invent, and frantic. The teacher could best promote the students’ accurate, efficient reading of this type of word by teaching them to use which of the following decoding strategies?

Answer 12

Look at the vowels in a target word; if they are separated by two consonants, divide the word between the consonants (e.g., muf/fin), and then read each syllable from left to right.

Question 13

A fourth-grade student tries to decode the word accumulate in a science article by using syllabication skills. In order to read the individual syllables of the word after dividing them correctly, the student would need to be proficient in decoding which of the following syllable types?

Answer 13

closed, open, silent e

Question 14

A third-grade teacher uses word matrices as a strategy for teaching structural or morphemic analysis skills. The teacher models for students how to create and use a word matrix to generate related words by combining a base word or root with one or more affixes. Following is a word matrix for the base word move.
[re, un - move - s, ing, ed, er, ment]

The teacher supports students in generating the following list of words using this matrix: moves, moving, moved, mover, movement, movements, remove, removes, removing, removed, remover, unmoving, and unmoved.
Which of the following words that the students generated contains a derivational suffix?

Answer 14

mover

Question 15

A first-grade teacher would like to promote students’ development of accurate decoding to support their oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. The teacher could most effectively promote first graders’ accuracy by teaching them how to:

Answer 15

apply phonics skills and knowledge of common syllable types and inflections to read words.

Question 16

A third-grade teacher observes that students who can read aloud fluently also demonstrate greater comprehension of expository texts. The best explanation for this is that fluent readers:

Answer 16

are able to focus their full attention and cognitive resources on the meaning of a text.

Question 17

A first-grade teacher creates poetry booklets for students to read each day as a morning “warm-up” activity to begin supporting their development of reading fluency. The teacher sequences the poems in the booklets according to phonics patterns and high-frequency words that students have recently learned. At the beginning of each week, the teacher works with small groups of students to ensure that they can read their new poem-of-the-week accurately. For the rest of the week, students practice reading the new poem with a classmate from their group. They also practice reading aloud other poems in the fluency warm-up booklet that they have previously learned.
Which of the following rationales best describes the advantage of using poems for fluency practice?

Answer 17

Poetry is meant to be read aloud and reread many times to construct meaning.

Question 18

A second-grade student demonstrates automaticity decoding grade-level regular and irregular words. However, the student frequently experiences poor text comprehension with informational texts. Which of the following steps should the teacher take first to promote the student’s reading development?

Answer 18

using questioning to determine the student’s vocabulary and background knowledge with respect to the target texts

Question 19

A fifth-grade teacher is about to begin a new unit on ecosystems, with an emphasis on the movement of matter among the various components of an ecosystem. Which of the following types of vocabulary words from the unit would be most appropriate for the teacher to pre-teach?

Answer 19

words that are conceptually challenging

Question 20

A sixth-grade teacher is planning explicit instruction to develop students’ ability to read and understand sentences that have a complex sentence structure. Which of the following skills would be most effective for the teacher to focus on?

Answer 20

deconstructing complex sentences into independent and dependent clauses

Question 21

Over the course of the school year, a sixth-grade student who had been a fluent, proficient reader in previous years has become increasingly inconsistent in comprehending grade-level literary and informational texts assigned in class. The results of informal, curriculum-based assessments indicate that the student still meets grade-level expectations in vocabulary knowledge, but the student’s reading rate and comprehension have dropped below grade-level expectations. The teacher observes that the student does not read smoothly when reading aloud sentences that contain more than one clause, and the student often comments about “getting lost in the sentence.” The teacher is also aware that the student tends to choose fiction and graphic novels for independent reading that are written well below grade-level expectations. The student’s overall reading profile suggests that the student would likely benefit most from explicit instruction focused on promoting the student’s:

Answer 21

ability to deconstruct complex academic language and interpret its meaning.

Question 22

A sixth-grade student encounters the following sentence in a short story.
“She experienced a sense of déjà vu as she walked down the street of the strange new city.”
The student asks the teacher about the meaning of déjà vu in the sentence. The teacher could best respond by advising the student to take which of the following steps?

Answer 22

looking up the word in the dictionary, and then paraphrasing the sentence using the dictionary definition

Question 23

Some children in a kindergarten class have had limited prior exposure to storybooks read aloud and/or limited prior experiences discussing narrative texts. Their teacher wants to develop their knowledge of story structure. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following instructional approaches is most likely to accelerate the children’s understanding of the causal nature of story events?

Answer 23

teaching story elements explicitly, such as main character, goal or problem, and resolution, as part of the daily read-aloud

Question 24

Sixth-grade students have just finished reading a chapter in a novel and are getting ready to write an entry in their response journals. The teacher could most effectively develop students’ literary response skills by assigning which of the following journal prompts?

Answer 24

What do you think is the main idea or theme of the novel? Relate specific events in this chapter to the theme you suggest.

Question 25

A second-grade class is studying a social studies unit focused on geography (e.g., bodies of water, landforms) and its effects on people. So far, the students have learned about lakes, oceans, and bays. As part of the unit, the teacher reads aloud an informational passage that explains why human settlements near rivers historically have succeeded and grown. The teacher pauses regularly to discuss the reading, using a range of text-based questions to prompt discussion and promote students' literal, inferential, and evaluative comprehension. Part of the text appears below. "Rivers have fresh water. Fish and other wildlife live in and near rivers. The soil near rivers is good for growing crops and grazing animals. But rivers provided towns with more than just what people needed to survive. Moving water provided a source of power that people could harness for industry. And, over time, large rivers became superhighways for travel and trade across great distances." Which of the following questions about this part of the text would most effectively target students' inferential comprehension?

Answer 25

Do you think living near a river makes life easier or more difficult for people, and what information in the text makes you think so?

Question 26

A sixth-grade teacher is planning an instructional unit on summarizing informational text. In one lesson, the teacher will show students how to use the graphic organizer shown below to support them in identifying important ideas from an informational passage. Which of the following learning goals would be most essential for the teacher to address in the lesson to develop students' ability to compose an effective summary from these kinds of notes?

Answer 26

citing evidence from the passage using direct quotes and paraphrasing

Question 27

A second-grade teacher frequently reads aloud informational books related to grade-level content in social studies, science, and the arts. The teacher supports students in developing their own questions during and after the read-alouds and then helps them conduct research on their questions using grade-level resources the teacher has collected on these topics. In keeping with evidence-based best practices, providing direct instruction in which of the following aspects of informational text would be most essential to students' success and growing independence in using informational texts for personal research?

Answer 27

using text features to locate specific information in a text

Question 28

A third-grade student performs below grade-level expectations in word-reading accuracy on informal assessments. Since the majority of the student's errors are with multisyllable words, the teacher plans to provide the student with daily explicit instruction for one week on the use of syllable-division strategies for reading multisyllable words. The teacher will then reassess the student at the end of the trial period. The primary benefit of this approach to informal assessment is that it:

Answer 28

helps the teacher determine whether the student has the potential for improvement with short-term intervention.

Question 29

A third-grade teacher notes that students' vocabulary scores on a school-wide standardized achievement test are below the national average and below their performance on the comprehension and decoding subtests. In response to students' performance on the vocabulary measure, the teacher plans to take a more systematic and robust approach to vocabulary instruction. The teacher's use of the data best underscores the importance of which of the following approaches to reading assessment?

Answer 29

using results from reading assessments to guide instructional decision making

Question 30

A kindergarten teacher regularly elicits oral retellings of stories children have listened to or read as a way to assess their understanding of narrative text structures. The retell protocol the teacher uses has a child retell the story to a stuffed animal, named Storalee, as the teacher records notes and checks off story components. The teacher starts with the prompt, "Tell our friend Storalee the whole story because she has not heard it before." The teacher rates each child's understanding of the text's characters, setting, events, and relationships according to standards-based rubric descriptors for story elements. Which of the following components should be included in the story elements rubric to ensure that the assessment will provide information about children's understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships found in narrative texts?

Answer 30

identifying evidence of children's use of conjunctions (e.g., because, so, since) to connect the character's motivation to actions taken

Question 31

When considering how to support students who are at risk for reading difficulties, an elementary school teacher first tries to align an individual student's profile with one of the following evidence-based reading-difficulty profiles. Profile 1: The student reads words accurately and efficiently but demonstrates needs in word knowledge and/or comprehension skills. Profile 2: The student demonstrates needs in decoding and word recognition but has strong word knowledge and comprehension skills. Profile 3: The student demonstrates needs in decoding and word recognition and also in word knowledge and comprehension skills. One advantage of the teacher keeping these general profiles in mind when considering whether a student may be at risk for reading difficulties is that it helps the teacher:

Answer 31

determine a direction for specific diagnostic probes (e.g., identifying gaps in phonics knowledge using a word-pattern survey).

Question 32

When considering how to support students who are at risk for reading difficulties, an elementary school teacher first tries to align an individual student's profile with one of the following evidence-based reading-difficulty profiles. Profile 1: The student reads words accurately and efficiently but demonstrates needs in word knowledge and/or comprehension skills. Profile 2: The student demonstrates needs in decoding and word recognition but has strong word knowledge and comprehension skills. Profile 3: The student demonstrates needs in decoding and word recognition and also in word knowledge and comprehension skills. The teacher is planning progress monitoring for students whose reading performance fits one of the three profiles and who will be receiving differentiated instruction or an intervention to address their identified needs. Which of the following guidelines would be most important for the teacher to follow when planning progress-monitoring for this purpose?

Answer 32

selecting assessment instruments or techniques that will show even small improvements

Question 33

A teacher is planning reading instruction for a small group of students who exhibit the following characteristics. * The students can point accurately to words in predictable texts after listening to and following the teacher reading aloud and tracking the text several times using a big book format. * The students can identify the beginning and final sounds of simple three-phoneme words presented orally and can sometimes identify a word's medial sound. * The students have developed sound-symbols associations for the majority of consonant sounds and some vowel sounds. * The students can read several high-frequency words in simple texts. * The students can spell words with an accurate beginning consonant sound and sometimes an accurate final consonant sound. Given these characteristics, the students are most likely beginning to transition to which of the following phases of word reading?

Answer 33

partial alphabetic

Question 34

Which of the following statements describes the most important reason for a fourth-grade teacher to assign a variety of high-quality trade books as a component of reading instruction?

Answer 34

Reading across genres contributes to students' developing understanding of the structures and features of different texts.

Question 35

A fifth-grade class silently reads an informational text. In subsequent informal assessments, several students are able to read the text orally with fluency, but they demonstrate poor overall comprehension of the text. The teacher could most appropriately address these students' needs by adjusting future instruction in which of the following ways?

Answer 35

introducing a text's key vocabulary and supporting the students in close reading of key passages

Question 36

A fifth-grade teacher is planning a literature study focused on how various elements of an author's craft are used to convey a poem's theme. The class includes students with a wide range of reading and language skills, including several advanced readers. Over the course of the unit, the class reads and analyzes the themes of several, increasingly complex, grade-level poems. Near the end of the unit, the teacher will have students practice literary analysis skills on an unfamiliar grade-level poem. According to evidence-based best practices, which of the following differentiation strategies would be most appropriate for the teacher to use with advanced readers during this lesson?

Answer 36

having all students work in small, homogeneous groups to analyze a poem at an appropriate level of complexity for the group