Scholarship and Selection Tests : A Guide for Students and Parents, 2nd Edition 9781742863191, 9781742861562

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A guide for students and parents 2nd edition

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• • •

Cover images: © AISPIX by Image Source | Shutterstock.com © Dmitri Mikitenko | Shutterstock.com

2nd e d it i on

Scholarship and selection tests aim to identify the very best students for elite schools and accelerated learning programs. Many outstanding students sit these tests, but there are relatively few scholarship and select-entry places offered. To be of any use, scholarship and selection tests must identify very small differences in the academic performance of very high-achieving students. The tests are demanding and the process can be very competitive. As a result, preparing, applying and sitting for a scholarship or selection test can be a challenging process for students and parents — but this experience can also provide an opportunity for students to develop their academic skills and abilities in valuable ways. Scholarship and Selection Tests: A guide for students and parents aims to help students and parents to better understand scholarship and selection tests, so that students can develop their full potential and parents can support their children do their best when it counts. This second edition contains: updated advice on preparing for scholarship and selection tests, including all-new: ◗◗ information on dealing with gifted and talented students ◗◗ resources on select-entry accelerated, high-achievement and gifted and talented programs ◗◗ details on specific scholarship and selection tests ◗◗ case studies and insights from participating schools example questions and sample answers with detailed explanations, strategies and approaches suggestions on how students can develop the skills and abilities the tests target guidance on how to manage expectations and better understand results.

Schola r s hip and s election te s ts 

Scholarship and Selection Tests

Scholarship and Selection Tests

A guide for students and parents

ISBN 978-1-74286-156-2

2nd edition 9 781742 861562

Scholarship and Selection Tests

Scholarship and Selection Tests A guide for students and parents 2nd edition

Rebecca Leech

ACER Press

This edition published 2013 by ACER Press, an imprint of Australian Council for Educational Research Ltd 19 Prospect Hill Road, Camberwell Victoria, 3124, Australia First published 2009 as A Parent’s Guide to Scholarship Tests Reprinted 2010, 2012 www.acerpress.com.au [email protected] Text copyright © Australian Council for Educational Research 2013 Design and typography copyright © ACER Press 2013 This book is copyright. All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Copyright Act 1968 of Australia and subsequent amendments, and any exceptions permitted under the current statutory licence scheme administered by Copyright Agency Limited (www.copyright.com.au), no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, broadcast or communicated in any form or by any means, optical, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. Cover design, text design and typesetting by ACER Project Publishing Printed in Australia by BPA Print Group National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: (pbk) Author:

Leech, Rebecca.

Title: Scholarship and selection tests: a guide for students and Parents / Rebecca Leech. Edition:

2nd ed.

ISBN:

9781742861562 (pbk.)

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Subjects: Scholarships--Australia. Examinations--Study guides. Academic achievement. Ability--Testing. Dewey Number:

378.340994

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1

Chapter 2

vii viii

Getting started

1

What are scholarship and selection tests?

1

Identifying high-achieving students

3

Gifted and talented students

3

Deciding to sit for a scholarship or selection test

7

Choosing a school

9

Registering for a scholarship or selection test

11

Case study: Box Hill High School, Melbourne, Victoria

13

About the tests

16

Answering multiple-choice questions

19

Humanities and Reading Comprehension

24

Mathematics and Science

30

Abstract Reasoning

36

Written Expression

39

Case study: Anglican Church Grammar School, Brisbane, Queensland 49

Contents

Chapter 3

Developing skills and abilities

51

Practice tests and private tutoring

54

Thinking 55 Reading 64 Writing 68 Mathematics 72 Case study: Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Sydney, New South Wales 76 Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Preparing for the day

78

The week before the test

78

The day of the test

80

During the test

81

After the test

85

Case Study: Trinity Anglican School, White Rock, Queensland

85

Now what?

87

Managing expectations

87

Understanding the meaning of results

88

Requests for information

93

Case study: St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School, Gippsland, Victoria 95 Appendix 1: Description of specific scholarship tests

97

Appendix 2: D  escription of specific selection tests, select-entry schools and programs

100

References

106

vi

Acknowledgements ACER would like to acknowledge the contributions of the following people to the development of this book: Transitions Coordinator of Box Hill High School, Mrs Elizabeth Cohen; Deputy Headmaster (Academic) of Anglican Church Grammar School, Dr Dirk Wellham; Head Teacher, Curriculum R–12 of Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Sydney, Mr Rod Broadhead; Principal of Trinity Anglican School, Mr Christopher Daunt Watney; and Head of Admissions of St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School, Mrs Amanda Bibby.

Source acknowledgements p. 17a Image © Colette3 2013. Used under licence from Shutterstock.com; p. 17b Image © Tony Campbell 2013. Used under licence from Shutterstock.com; p. 17c Image © Gary Unwin 2013. Used under licence from Shutterstock.com; p. 20 Image © Creative Jen Designs 2013. Used under licence from Shutterstock. com; p. 41 Lighthouse image © 2013 Amanda Coleiro; p. 43 Grandfather clock image reproduced with permission of (Kevin O’Connell). Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact copyright owners. However, should any infringement have occurred, ACER tenders its apology and invites copyright owners to contact ACER.

vii

Introduction This book is for parents considering registering their child to sit a scholarship or selection test, and for the students who will sit the test. It contains advice and information to help you as a student or parent: • reflect on your motivations and expectations • understand the details of the testing process • familiarise yourself with the format and structure of scholarship and selection tests • familiarise yourself with the types of questions commonly found in scholar­ ship and selection tests • understand more about underlying skills and abilities these tests target • understand more about how students can work to develop these skills and abilities • help you to prepare for the day of the test • help you to manage expectations and understand the meaning of results. Note that the title of the book is not How to Win a Scholarship or How to Get into the School of Your Choice. Each student’s level of achievement on the test will be largely the result of his or her natural abilities, learning and efforts over a long period of time. The aim of this book is to help you make the best of that learning and those efforts. There are many approaches you could take to preparing your child for a scholarship or selection test and this book provides a great deal of useful advice. However, it is not an exhaustive list of every learning exercise proven to make a positive difference to test results. Children develop at different rates, and each child has an individual set of interests and abilities, just as each parent has an individual style of parenting. The aim of the advice in this book is to provide a range of ideas from which you may choose those that appeal to you and your child. What you make of this advice is up to you.

viii

Introduction

Many parents feel daunted by the responsibility of preparing their children to sit a scholarship or selection test. Parents often feel they need strong advice and clear instruction on how to proceed. With this in mind, this book is written in a direct way and, in many cases, will take an instructive tone, rather than couching statements in qualifications and disclaimers. For simplicity’s sake, the text is more likely to read, ‘Read to your child’ than to read, ‘There is some evidence that reading to your child may have a positive effect on your child’s literacy levels, although this is the subject of some debate in the academic community’. Some points that this book will repeat many times are: that scholarship and selection tests are designed to be difficult for high-achieving students; that many more students sit for scholarship and selection tests than there are places available; and that most students who sit a scholarship or selection test will not get a place. In light of this, rather than focusing on attaining a scholarship or gaining entry to a particular school or program as the goal, the emphasis in this book has been placed on the process of preparing for the test, and making that process as useful as possible for each student in the wider context of his or her learning.

A note on gender For simplicity of language this book will refer to students, and your child as a potential test candidate, as female (‘she’, ‘her’, and so on) rather than ‘he or she’, ‘his or her’, and so on, from this point on. Despite this, the advice and suggestions given are intended to apply to both boys and girls; this book will not give any gender-specific advice about preparing boys or girls. A lot has been written in recent times about differences between the learning styles of boys and girls. Some of this is evidence-based but much is not. When considering population groups like ‘males’ and ‘females’ it is often the case that variation within the group is as large as or larger than variation between the groups. In other words, just as knowing that men are on average taller than women doesn’t tell you whether your son will be taller than the centre for the National Women’s Basketball Team, so knowing that females on average use certain learning styles more than males doesn’t tell you much about any particular boy or girl. You and your child are in the best position

ix

Introduction

to understand and judge her (and your) individual learning styles and strengths. Please note that ACER conducts extensive reviews during test development and trialling to ensure that there is no gender bias in any test units, items or stimulus materials.

A note on terminology Throughout this book, and in the wider educational context, the terms ‘selective entry’, ‘select-entry’ and ‘selective’ are used interchangeably to describe schools and programs that offer places based on some kind of selection criteria. Whichever term is used, they should be taken to mean the same thing.

x

Chapter 1 Getting started

While you are no doubt keen to get started with preparing your child to sit a scholarship or selection test, it is best to start with the basics. This chapter will explain the purpose of scholarship and selection tests and, as importantly, will ask you to reflect on your motivations for registering your child to sit one.

What are scholarship and selection tests? Scholarship tests Schools use scholarship tests to determine academic performance at the top end of achievement. Based on the results of a scholarship test, schools may decide to award a student a full or partial scholarship to cover the cost of attendance fees. Individual schools have their own criteria for awarding scholarships, and this may not be based entirely on the results of scholarship tests, but the tests do provide schools with objective, comparable information about student achievement across a range of academic areas. The most widely used tests streamline the scholarship application process for students.

Selection tests Schools also use selection tests to determine academic performance at the top end of achievement. Different schools use selection tests for different purposes. Selective government secondary schools and some independent schools use selection tests to determine which students will gain entry to the schools.

1

Scholarship and Selection tests

Some non-selective government secondary schools offer a number of places to students from out of the local school zone, and may award these places based on the results of selection tests. Other schools might use selection tests to determine which students entering or enrolled at the school are eligible for gifted and talented or accelerated learning programs. Yet other schools may use selection tests to identify high-achieving students in order to offer them extension activities within mainstream classes. Again, individual schools have their own criteria for awarding select-entry places, and this may not be based entirely on the results of selection tests, but the tests do provide schools with objective, comparable information about student achievement across a range of academic areas.

Other types of testing Most schools test students on entry and throughout the year to monitor students’ progressive achievement. These low-stakes tests are designed to measure

whether

each

student

is

developing

academic

skills

and

understandings, learning the curriculum that is being taught and performing to her full potential. These tests allow schools to personalise the learning of individual students: to extend high-achieving students and to offer support to students who need it. Students at different year levels in their schooling may also be required to sit for national or international testing. This may include the National Assessment Program (NAP) in Literacy and Numeracy, Science Literacy, Civics and Citizenship, and Information and Communication Technology Literacy; the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA); the Trends in International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS); and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). These low-stakes tests allow governments to ensure Australian students are meeting important educational goals against national and international benchmarks and they also inform educational policy. Scholarship and selection tests are very different from diagnostic and monitoring tests. National testing programs are designed to test the entire student population, from the lowest- to the highest-achieving students. Scholarship and selection tests are designed to be very challenging for highachieving students.

2

Getting started

Identifying high-achieving students As these tests aim to identify the very best students from a group of highachieving students, they are very challenging. Schools are generally more interested in assessing students’ abilities to think creatively and to problemsolve than in assessing their abilities to memorise facts and figures. In light of this, many scholarship and selection tests aim more to measure students’ skills of analysis, comprehension, interpretation and reasoning, rather than to test their knowledge of curriculum content. Many scholarship and selection tests will assess students’ aptitudes in key academic areas such as written expression, reading and viewing, humanities, mathematics and science. Many more students sit scholarship and selection tests than there are scholarships or select-entry places available. The schools that run these tests have very strict standards about who will receive places. Some schools may have a hundred or more students sit the test for each scholarship or select-entry place available. The aim of these tests is to identify the very best potential students from a pool of outstanding students. To be of any use, scholarship and selection tests must find and exaggerate often very small differences in the academic performance of high-achieving students. These tests are designed to be challenging for students who are accustomed to receiving high marks and excelling in school. In any group of students sitting a scholarship or selection test, the overwhelming majority will be students who achieve in the top 20 per cent of the students in their year-level nationwide.

Gifted and talented students The concept of giftedness in children is complex and can be contentious. There is no commonly accepted definition of giftedness. Most discussion about giftedness, however, makes a distinction between the ideas of potential and performance. Potential, also sometimes called aptitude, can be thought of as a student’s ability to learn. Performance, also called competence, can be thought of as student’s demonstrated achievement.

3

Scholarship and Selection tests

Many schools in Australia and around the world draw on the theories of Professor Francoys Gagné, a French-Canadian psychology professor and leading authority on giftedness, to develop educational programs for gifted and talented students (Gagné, 2003). Gagné’s model suggests that gifted students are those who have very high potential or ability in one or more of the domains of intellect, creativity, social interaction, perception, or muscular or motor control. He considers that talented students are those who have demonstrated outstanding performance in one or more areas, such as academics, arts, technology, sports, social service, business and leadership, or athletic endeavours. According to this model of giftedness, ability transforms into achievement through a complex developmental process. This process is shaped by a number of factors, including a child’s personal characteristics, such as motivation, willpower, confidence and self-awareness; and her home and school learning environments, including the influence of her family and her teachers. Following this model, then, we can see that potential or ability is not the same as performance or achievement. Even if you agree that some children seem to have a more natural ability in some areas than others, these children will not necessarily become high-achieving students unless there are other positive factors, such as student interest and hard work and family and school support. Similarly, a student who is encouraged to set high standards for herself and work hard to achieve them may be just as likely to succeed as an apparently gifted student who is not supported or extended. All students have the potential to learn, to improve on what they know, understand and can do. Australian Council for Educational Research chief executive Professor Geoff Masters argues that human ability or intelligence is not fixed. Children are not born with their future level of intellectual achievement set in stone; every child is capable of developing their skills and knowledge. In his essay on ‘The Power of Expectation’ (2011), Masters writes that: ... educational achievement is not pre-determined in the way that attributes such as height are pre-determined. Achievement is strongly influenced by the quality of teaching, parental support and expectations, and student effort.

4

Getting started

Educational achievement also is not a competition with limited spoils for the winners. Just as levels of health, wealth and educational participation have increased in the general population over time, there is no reason why the percentage of students achieving excellence also should not increase.

Characteristics of gifted and talented students In education settings, it is generally accepted that a gifted and talented child who has been supported and extended will be performing at a level significantly advanced from the average for other students her age. A gifted and talented child may display a range of interests, skills and understandings beyond her similar-aged peers; on the downside, she may also display signs of frustration or boredom if she is not being adequately challenged. According to the Australian Council for Educational Research (2011, p. 2): Typically, gifted students learn rapidly in certain domains, quickly grasping and applying concepts. In these domains, they think critically and creatively, and use advanced techniques to problem-solve. They may have a good memory and vocabulary, an independent approach to tasks, and sophisticated interests in their preferred areas. They may have advanced leadership and interpersonal skills. They may display perfectionism, hypersensitivity and over-excitability. The range of characteristics displayed may vary between children of different ages and personalities. However, as a very general guide, some common characteristics of gifted and talented children are discussed in the section below. The Director of the Gifted Development Centre at the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development in the United States, Dr Linda Kreger Silverman, has compiled a list of common traits of gifted and talented children. She suggests that if a child demonstrates more than three-quarters of these traits, it is likely that she is gifted (Silverman, 2003): • good problem-solving and reasoning abilities • rapid learning ability • early or avid reading ability

5

Scholarship and Selection tests

• extensive vocabulary • ability with numbers • good at visual puzzles • excellent memory • long attention span • personal sensitivity • compassion for others • perfectionism • intensity • moral sensitivity • unusual curiosity • persevering when interested • high degree of energy • preference for older companions • wide range of interests • great sense of humour • concerned with justice, fairness • at times, judgement seems mature for age • keen powers of observation • vivid imagination • high degree of creativity • tends to question authority. Your child may display these traits in a number of ways. For example, your child may display advancement in her thinking skills, and be likely to learn new skills very quickly, recall past events quickly and accurately, and make sophisticated connections between past and present experiences. She may display advanced planning skills for her age in her learning or play, improvise well in learning or play, or find unusual or imaginative ways to do things. Your child may show advanced speech and language skills, and be likely to use language creatively, such as through inventing intricate songs or stories. She is likely to be able to understand and act on complex directions in her learning. She may also be adept at using language to resolve conflict, or to manipulate the behaviour of other children. If you child displays advanced social skills, you may notice that she is able to handle the kinds of responsibilities that would usually be given to older

6

Getting started

children. On the downside, she may sometimes come across as bossy, if she is prone to taking charge in learning or play with other children. She may also become easily frustrated with other children if she does not understand why they do not share her level of understanding and ability (Government of South Australia, Women’s and Children’s Health Network, 2011; Government of Western Australia, Department of Education, 2012).

Deciding to sit for a scholarship or selection test Preparing for and sitting a scholarship or selection test can involve a lot of hard work and emotional stress. It can be a gruelling and competitive experience, both for the children and for their parents. Most students who sit a scholarship test will not receive a place, and the disappointment of missing out can be demoralising if not handled sensitively. This may be especially true if your child is accustomed to achieving academic excellence. Working in a group of mixed-ability students, such as is found in an everyday school classroom, your child may often find herself achieving in the top percentage of students. In a scholarship or selection test, however, your child will be competing against other very high-achieving students for a very limited number of places. Further, some students who receive a scholarship or select-entry place find that when they do attend the school of their choice, they experience increased pressure — from the school, peers, or themselves — to excel academically to ‘prove’ they ‘deserve’ the place. In some cases, scholarship or select-entry recipients have attended the school of their choice but decided that it was not a good fit. In the case of scholarship places, when this happens, the scholarship monies are forfeited and may have to be repaid to the school. Weighed against these potential negative effects, the most obvious benefit of sitting a scholarship or selection test is the prospect that your child may win a place to the school of your choice. Certainly, the adage that ‘you have to be in it to win it’ holds true in the case of scholarship testing. Unfortunately, however, while the odds are better than winning the lottery, there is a strong possibility that your child, despite being a very high-achieving student, may not receive a place. Rather than having the scholarship or select-entry place as the goal, an emphasis on the process — and making that process as useful as you can — is an important consideration.

7

Scholarship and Selection tests

The test preparation process can be a beneficial learning experience. Preparing for the test can be an excellent opportunity for a student to develop problem-solving and creative thinking skills that may be useful throughout the rest of her schooling, and indeed her life. Families may find that the extensive time spent together on long-term preparation for the test is a valuable bonding experience. The experience of sitting a large public examination can also be constructive practise for the rest of a student’s academic career. With these considerations in mind, it may be useful to reflect on your motivation for registering your child to sit a scholarship or selection test. Ask yourself: • Why do I want my child to do this? • Is my child likely to win a scholarship or select-entry place? • How will my child react if she doesn’t win a place? How will I react? • Can I make the process of preparing for and sitting the test a positive experience for my child regardless of the outcome? • How important is it to me, and to my child, that she wins a scholarship or select-entry place? Each parent and student will weigh these considerations differently, and only you and your family can decide what is best for your child.

Steps to deciding if your child should sit a scholarship or selection test 1. Consider your child’s academic results. In particular, consider her performance on national testing programs such as the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) or on statewide programs. It is important to remember that these programs are different to scholarship and selection tests; NAPLAN is a general test for every student in Australia, while the scholarship and selection tests are specialised for high-achieving students. National or statewide programs do, however, assess the general academic ability of your child, and provide an overview of your child’s performance against other students’. As a guide, the candidature for scholarship and selection tests is usually the top 20 per cent of students. 2. Genuinely assess not only your child’s intellectual capability, but also her emotional capability to handle a challenging, long-term preparation process and the possibility

8

Getting started of not winning a scholarship or select-entry place. The notion that your child can’t get a place if she doesn’t sit the test is true — but the process is very competitive, and it is important that children do not feel they have ‘failed’ if they don’t receive a place. Consider whether your child is emotionally capable of reacting well to a letter that says, ‘You have been unsuccessful in your application.’ Most students who sit the test will receive such a letter. 3. Consider which school is the best fit for your child’s interests and abilities. Investigate whether the school of your choice offers scholarships or select-entry programs, and if so which scholarship and selection tests the school runs. For more on this, see the next section, ‘Which school should my child apply to?’

Choosing a school Choosing a school for your child could be the subject of another book entirely. This section will focus on how to choose the school where your child should apply to sit a scholarship or selection test. Individual schools choose whether they want to award scholarships or select-entry places, how many places they will award, to whom and on what criteria. Scholarship and selection tests provide schools with objective measurement of students’ academic aptitude — but this may not be the only factor in schools’ choice of scholarship and select-entry recipients. Not all schools run all scholarship or selection tests. Not all schools run tests at all levels of entry. Some schools do not allow current students of that school to sit for scholarship or selective program entry tests. Check the details of the tests offered at the school of your choice to avoid registering your child for a test for which she is ineligible. Be sure to check the level of the test is applicable to your child’s next year at school. Some schools weigh aspects of the scholarship or selection test results more heavily than others; for example, if the school wants to improve its mathematics scores, it may choose to award a place to a student who performed very well in the maths section of a scholarship test, even if that student was not the best performer overall. Conversely, other schools may look for academically balanced students who perform reasonably well across all sections of the test.

9

Scholarship and Selection tests

Schools may consider additional criteria not covered by the scholarship or selection test, such as students’ leadership potential, involvement in extracurricular or co-curricular activities or community service, or achievement in sports, music or arts programs. Some schools conduct interviews with a shortlist of students before awarding places. Some schools have a set number of scholarships or select-entry places they award each year based on consistent criteria. Other schools vary the number or type of such places or the criteria from year to year. Some schools may not decide how many scholarships or select-entry places they will award until they have seen the results of scholarship and selection tests. Some may not award any scholarships, or may break equivalent full scholarships into half or partial scholarships awarded to several students. Some schools apply limits to their scholarships, and may only award scholarships to students who meet their definition of financial need. You may want to know what the chances are that your child will win a scholarship or select-entry place, but due to the variables between individual schools, this is difficult to quantify. It is likely, however, that your child will have a better chance of winning a place at a school that values her particular interests and strengths. Before registering your child to sit a scholarship or selection test at your school of choice, learn as much as you can about the school’s scholarship or selection procedures. Read the school’s website and newsletters, and if you have questions, contact the school directly.

Considerations when choosing a school • How many scholarships or select-entry places does the school plan to offer? • Does the school plan to offer full or partial scholarships? • How many students usually sit the scholarship or selection test for the school? • Are some sections of the test weighted more heavily than others? Is the school particularly looking for students strong in written expression, humanities, or maths and science? • Are scholarships or select-entry places awarded based purely on the results of the test, or does the school have additional criteria? If so, what are these criteria?

10

Getting started • Does the school apply additional criteria not covered by the scholarship or selection test, such as students’ leadership potential, involvement in extra-curricular activities or community service, or achievement in sports, music or arts programs? • Does the school conduct interviews of students before awarding scholarships or select-entry places? • Does the school apply limits, such as financial need, when awarding scholarships? If so, what are these factors and how are they defined?

Registering for a scholarship or selection test Scholarship and selection tests are often run by organisations external to schools. The testing organisation will develop the test, supply test materials to participating schools for administration, and then collect completed tests to conduct the marking, analysis and reporting. You must register with the school, not the testing organisation. To ensure objectivity and neutrality, testing organisations have minimal contact with students and parents. In general, testing organisations report the results directly to participating schools, not to students or parents. Some providers may send individual reports direct to students but this is the exception rather than the rule. Testing organisations do not choose which students receive scholarships. Each school sets their own registration fee. You must pay a separate fee for each school with which you register. Check with the individual school. Scholarship and selection tests are usually held between February and July of the year before the intake of that scholarship cohort; for example, a student would sit the scholarship or selection test in February of her final year of primary school, for potential entry into the secondary school of her choice the following year. Be sure to check with the school of your choice to confirm testing dates. Cooperative testing programs allow you to register your child with more than one participating school, but your child will sit the one test only. You must pay the registration fee for each school. Your child’s results are then passed on to all the schools you have registered with. You can register your child to sit a scholarship or selection test either via a pen and paper registration form available from schools, or online via schools’

11

Scholarship and Selection tests

websites. Some schools accept only pen and paper registrations or only online registrations; check with the school of your choice. Check individual schools’ websites or contact schools’ scholarship or transitions administrators for further information about scholarships and select-entry registration processes. Some schools may require additional information or have extra registration forms to fill out. It is your responsibility to check whether you have met a school’s requirements before submitting an application. Your child will usually sit the test at the school for which she wishes to apply. In the case of cooperative tests, your child will sit the test at the first preference school. If you are distant from the school, most programs will be able to offer you alternative arrangements. After the test day, the testing organisation will mark the completed tests. Marking of multiple-choice answer sheets is computerised. For some tests, specialised teams of experienced markers conduct marking of the written expression sections of the test, and each written piece is blind-marked by several markers. Blind marking is a process where tests are graded independently so that one marker’s grade does not influence the other marker’s grade and vice versa. The testing organisation provides results to the school or schools you have registered with. Testing organisations will generally provide results to schools within one month of the test date. Schools relay results to students at their discretion. Your child will receive written notification from the school stating whether or not she has been successful in winning a scholarship or a select-entry place to the school. Testing organisations may also provide an individual report of your child’s performance to the school, which the school may choose to pass onto you. If your child is successful in winning a scholarship or select-entry place, the school of your choice will provide further information on how to enrol your child. For ideas on how to debrief if your child does not receive a scholarship or select-entry place, see Chapter 5, ‘Now what?’, later in this book.

12

Getting started

Case study: Box Hill High School, Melbourne, Victoria Box Hill High School is a coeducational government secondary school catering to approximately 1000 students. Entry to the school, due to high demand and a small site, is subject to government neighbourhood zoning policy. Under the zoning policy, all children in the local area seeking enrolment will be admitted. The school has a well-established Select Entry Accelerated Learning (SEAL) program. SEAL is a stategovernment-accredited program for students with high potential (see Appendix 2 for more information). Neighbourhood zoning does not apply to the SEAL program. Under the SEAL program, students are able to accelerate or extend their education. Students in the Box Hill High School SEAL program may choose to condense the six-year secondary curriculum into five years; however, most choose to study for six years and enrich their education by undertaking breadth subjects (such as advanced writing skills or mechanical/electronic engineering) and additional subjects from the Victorian Certificate of Education and University Enhancement subjects in their senior secondary schooling. Box Hill High School uses the Higher Ability Selection Test (HAST) to identify students for entry to the SEAL program (see Appendix 1 for more information on HAST). Box Hill High School requires students sitting the HAST to take an additional maths test developed by the school. Students sit the selection test in Year 6 for entry into Box Hill High School in Year 7. Box Hill High School Transition Coordinator, Mrs Elizabeth Cohen, explains that the school’s mainstream curriculum is academically focused, and that the SEAL program is particularly intensive. ‘Anyone is welcome to sit the selection test but many children who sit the test have been identified as gifted from a very early age. For example, some children have had educational psychologists give them the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children [WISC-IV] test; others

13

Scholarship and Selection tests

identify from the National Assessment Program — Literacy and ­ Numeracy [NAPLAN] testing,’ Mrs Cohen says. The school considers students’ overall performance on the selection test when identifying students for the SEAL program. ‘The selection test result is the first thing we look at. We consider students’ performance in all sections of the test to define the top-ranking students,’ Mrs Cohen says. The school also considers additional criteria to further narrow the pool of high-achieving students identified by the selection test. ‘Parents who aim to have their children entered into the SEAL program usually send in a complete CV of their child — including reference letters from principals and teachers, school reports, NAPLAN test results, and so on — to support their application to get into the program,’ she says. Box Hill High School also conducts interviews with students as part of the SEAL selection process. The school discourages parents from sending their children to test coaching programs. ‘A lot of parents ask if they can send their children to coaching schools to prepare for the selection process, but we strongly prefer that students aren’t coached. We don’t want children to be coached to within an inch of their life every spare minute they have. We are looking to identify the children who are genuinely gifted for our SEAL program, as we select on potential rather than proven performance,’ Mrs Cohen explains. In 2012, more than 260 students sat the selection test for 2013 Year 7 entry into the SEAL program at Box Hill High School and there were more than 500 applications for Year 7 places. Mrs Cohen notes that this was a 25 per cent increase on the previous years’ candidature, and that the increase in number and calibre of students sitting the test also meant that the cut-off score for entry to the SEAL program rose by 20 points in one year. The school takes approximately 75 students into the SEAL program. A small number of

14

Getting started

high-achieving students who miss out on the SEAL program may be placed on a waiting list. Once the Year 7 enrolment intake has been finalised, the students sit further testing, such as the Middle Years Achievement Test (MYAT) or the Progressive Achievement Test (PAT) series (see Appendix 1 for more information on MYAT). This testing provides the school with comparable information on the entire Year 7 cohort; allows the school to identify students that require extension or extra learning assistance; and then allows the school to monitor individual students’ literacy and numeracy skills and their progress over time. This testing also allows the school to identify the top-performing students from the mainstream Year 7 intake who will require a more challenging program. ‘The SEAL program is not intended to have elite classes separating high-performing students from regular students. All the students mix in various subjects throughout their schooling. Academic excellence is valued by the school, and all students benefit from that focus,’ Mrs Cohen explains. ‘Box Hill High School is quite an academic school and some of the children that come here are quite high-achieving students, but we want everyone to perform as well as they can,’ she says.

15

Chapter 2 About the tests

Different kinds of scholarship and selection tests may use different approaches. Some take what might be considered a more traditional approach, testing students’ curriculum-based knowledge: facts and figures, vocabulary, basic arithmetic and so forth. Scoring well on these types of tests requires students to have a strong retention of content they have memorised previously. A traditional geography test may require students to know the capital cities of South America; a traditional science test may require students to memorise the first 20 elements of the Periodic Table; and traditional mathematics test may require students to recall the formula for the area of a circle. Many other scholarship and selection tests, however, take an approach that prioritises higher-order thinking skills. Such scholarship and selection tests focus less on students’ content knowledge — the tests are not curriculum based. Instead, such tests aim to assess students’ ability to reason, interpret, explain, problem-solve and express ideas in different subject areas such as humanities, mathematics and science. As a very simple example, compare the two science questions at the top of the following page. The answer to Question 1 is something you either know or don’t know. If you don’t know the answer, no matter how hard you think and despite how much you know about rats, you simply can’t answer the question. The way to know the answer is to read an article about rats and memorise the Latin names of the most common varieties.

16

About the tests

Q1. What is the Latin name for the black rat? Q2. The European magpie (Pica pica), the Black-billed magpie (Pica hudsonia) and the Australian magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen) are very similar-looking black and white birds native to three different continents. Which pair is more closely related?

European Magpie

Black-billed Magpie

Australian magpie

The answer to Question 2 is something that you might also happen to know or not know. The difference is that the answer to Question 2 can also be ‘reasoned’ and the more you know about science (in this case the scientific classification system using binomial Latin names) the better your reasoning is likely to be. In that sense, Question 2 is testing your scientific reasoning rather than just your scientific knowledge, although obviously having good scientific knowledge is a distinct advantage. The way to know the answer to this question is to understand the principles and methodologies of scientific classification in biology and be able to apply this knowledge to solving a given problem. The answer to Question 1 is Rattus rattus. The answer to Question 2 is that while European and Black-billed magpies are closely related, both belonging to the genus Pica, the Australian magpie is not very closely related to either, being a member of the genus Gymnorhina. This information required to answer Question 2 is provided in the question; this question can be solved through logical deduction even if the student didn’t already know the answer. Because many scholarship and selection tests do not focus on a particular set of facts and figures to be learned, the general consensus is that there is not much to be gained from doing hundreds or thousands of practice questions.

17

Scholarship and Selection tests

Given that these kinds of tests are designed to test how well students reason, interpret, explain, problem-solve and express ideas, this shouldn’t be surprising. Other sections of this book make the point that to improve results, students need to develop the kinds of skills and abilities that naturally develop at different rates, at different times and to different extents in different children. Chapter 3 of this book, ‘Developing skills and abilities’, looks at some ways of helping students and parents to think about these abilities and focus on their development. That said, being prepared for and familiar with a test may help build confidence and help a student to concentrate on the task at hand. Some students, especially younger students, might never have sat a formal examination before, while others may have done exams of various kinds but not in the format or question style of a scholarship or selection test. Those students may well benefit from familiarisation with the test that comes from attempting some practice items and practice test forms. Others may benefit from getting a better sense of what’s expected of them and a feel for the amount of time they have to address the questions. Scholarship and selection tests that take a critical-thinking approach are often reasonably similar in the types of questions asked and the areas covered, but they differ in detail of structure, timing and format. In particular some scholarship and selection tests have different levels depending on the year level into which the student is being selected. For more on the general structure and format of a number of scholarship tests, see the Appendices in the back of this book. Scholarship and selection tests generally use two types of questions: multiple-choice questions to test students’ understanding in humanities and in maths and science; and open-ended questions, to test students’ written expression. The next section discusses some of the special features of multiplechoice questions and provides some general advice on strategies and approaches to answering multiple-choice questions. Following sections discuss in more detail the parts of the tests that use multiple-choice question formats —

18

About the tests

humanities, and maths and science. The final section of this chapter looks at open-ended, written expression questions.

Answering multiple-choice questions Many scholarship and selection tests contain multiple-choice format sections testing students’ thinking in humanities, mathematics and science. Although the focus of these sections is to test your child’s ability to reason and understand, it is useful for students to have some understanding of the multiple-choice layout so that the format is not a distraction in any way. This is especially true for younger students who may not have had much or any exposure to formal testing.

Multiple-choice question structure Multiple-choice questions present the student with a question and/or stimulus and ask the student to choose one of a number of possible answers from a list provided. Most commonly there are four possible answers given and they are labelled A, B, C and D. Some tests are made up of individual multiple-choice questions while others feature questions that are arranged together around a common theme or stimulus. This might mean, for example, that a student reads a short text or looks at a picture or diagram and then answers a number of questions related to that text or picture. These questions together make up a unit. A typical multiple-choice question — whether alone or in a unit of work — consists of up to five separate parts, as shown in the question on the following page (note that this would be a very easy question on a scholarship or selection test for primary students). Some of the parts of the question, such as the heading, instruction and stimulus, are often included only once in the test, section or unit. The possible answers are known as the ‘options’. The correct answer is called the ‘key’ (or just the ‘answer’). The other options, which are not correct, are called ‘distractors’.

19

Scholarship and Selection tests Heading

Unit 1

Instruction

Look at the following picture and choose the best answer from the list below.

Stimulus

Question stem

Which state covers the largest area?

Options

A Western Australia B South Australia C Victoria D Tasmania

Multiple-choice question strategy It may seem that multiple-choice questions are easier than open-ended questions because the answer is there on the page — but so are the distractors (the incorrect options) and they are designed to be distracting. So what is the best way of approaching a multiple-choice question? Apart from the general advice that applies to all test questions — read the question carefully, refer to the stimulus text or picture, and so on — there is no one agreed best way of approaching this type of question. Some teachers and books give the specific advice that the student should first read over the questions, then read or view the stimulus, and then go back to the questions — sort of approaching the question back to front. The idea

20

About the tests

behind this is that knowing what the questions are in advance will help the student look for the kind of information that they need when reading the text. More traditionally, others give the advice that the student should start at the start by carefully reading the instructions and the text, and then move on to the questions, one at a time, referring back to the text as required. In fact, successful test takers use both these approaches at different times depending on the circumstances, including the type and length of the text or stimulus, the number of questions in a unit, and even whether they are at the beginning of the test with plenty of time or at the end of the test and trying to answer a few more questions in the last minute. Practising some different approaches to answering multiple-choice questions will give students confidence to apply whatever approach seems best at the time when doing the real test.

‘Knocking out’ One strategy that is often talked about is the technique of ‘knocking out’ the options that are clearly wrong. Although this strategy is not always the easiest and most obvious way to find the best answer, it is a useful skill to think about and practise because it can often give the student a start on finding the answer, or help confirm that the student has the best answer when she isn’t quite sure. Take the example question on the following page. To answer this question the student could use her understanding of time difference to work out the answer and then hunt for it in the list. Unfortunately, as many people know from experience, calculating time differences — especially across the Pacific — can be very tricky and confusing. Understanding that one of these options is the correct answer and the other three are wrong, the student could start by knocking out the obviously wrong ones and narrowing down the options. This should give her more confidence in her final choice of the right answer. Taking a look at this example question, from the stimulus it is plain that there is a big time difference between Sydney and New York, not a small one. Clearly then, option C is not right and can be knocked out. Option A also seems obviously wrong because the stimulus makes it clear that the difference is not simply 24 hours difference (i.e. the same time on a different day). That leaves only two plausible options: B and D. So using this strategy the student has already narrowed the field from four options to two options.

21

Scholarship and Selection tests Heading

Unit 4

Instruction

Look at the following text and choose the correct answer from the list below.

Stimulus

When it is 9.00 am on Tuesday in Sydney, it is 7.00 pm the previous day in New York City.



Sydney

New York City

Question stem

What time is it in Sydney, when it is 9.00 am on Thursday in New York City?

Options

A 9.00 am on Wednesday B 11.00 pm on Wednesday C 10.00 am on Thursday D 11.00 pm on Thursday

In this case, the remaining options provided are the same time of day — 11.00 pm — but different days: Wednesday or Thursday. So effectively we are left with a much smaller problem to solve. Is New York City behind or in front of Sydney? It seems fairly plain from the stimulus that New York City is behind Sydney (‘… it is 7.00 pm the previous day in New York City’) so Sydney must be ahead of New York City. That makes option D the only possible answer. There are several benefits of this knock out strategy: • It can save time by using the information in the question and the student’s estimating skills to help make a choice or narrow down the choice. • It can help the student double-check the result of an independent calculation. • It can give the student a good start in making a complex calculation by framing the likely range of answers (i.e. knocking out some obviously wrong options leaving the student with a smaller number of options to choose from). The real key to using this strategy is to think about it in a flexible way as an effective tool to support and supplement the student’s normal approach to

22

About the tests

reading the question and working out the answer. If the student can work out the question quickly and easily, the strategy can be used to double-check. If the question is a little harder, it can be used to narrow down the options. And finally if the student really can’t figure out the answer, it can be used to help her make an educated guess or start her on the right track.

The ‘best’ answer Multiple-choice question instructions are often framed using the phrase ‘best answer’ rather than ‘correct answer’. This can sometimes be confusing but is important to think about. The following is an example of a ‘best answer’ question: Part name

Example

Heading

Unit 3

Instruction

Read the following text and choose the best answer from the list below.

Stimulus

The girls looked down at their teacher curled in a foetal position at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Are you alright, Mr Smith?’ Abigail shouted in mock concern. Leannah could barely contain her laughter. ‘Do you want us to call an ambulance?’

Question stem

Which is the best answer? The girls’ attitude is:

Options

A callous B helpful C cheerful D boisterous

Some kind of argument could probably be made for all four options. Leannah is on the verge of laughing, so is she cheerful? Both girls ask if the teacher needs help, so are they helpful? Abigail shouts her question and Leannah is nearly laughing so perhaps they are a bit boisterous. Despite these arguments, the tone of the writing and some key words, such as ‘mock concern’, make it clear that answer A, callous, is the best answer even if a (weak) case could be argued for all of the other options. Choosing the best answer requires a certain amount of inference and informed judgement — something in itself that the question is designed to test.

23

Scholarship and Selection tests

Students in multiple choice tests must be prepared to be flexible and choose the best answer even when they feel that the absolutely correct answer is not there or that some of the distractors are partially correct.

Humanities and Reading Comprehension Different scholarship tests have sections with different titles such as humanities, comprehension, or reading and viewing. These are designed to test reasoning, problem-solving, interpretation and so on through written and/or visual materials. For ease of reference they will be referred to as ‘humanities’. These sections require the student to read a piece of writing or view a stimulus, such as a picture, map or diagram, and answer one or a series of multiple-choice questions.

Types of humanities questions Most people are familiar with the idea of reading comprehension questions. Reading, understanding, interpreting and applying understandings of written and visual texts is really a complex process made up of many different and overlapping skills and understandings. At the most basic level, there is ‘decoding’, actually reading the letters and working out what the words are. Of course reading the words isn’t the same as knowing them. For example, many people who could read the word ‘ultimogeniture’ and say it out loud quite correctly wouldn’t have any idea what it means. So vocabulary is also a reading skill. Similarly, understanding the way words combine in phrases and sentences to make meaning is also a skill — we don’t write words out in isolation. Just as important are the skills related to connecting ideas across text, like understanding that ‘it’ or ‘that dog’ refers to something mentioned before or after in the text. Then there are a range of skills and understandings relating to inferring and interpreting from both what is in the text and what is not. Good humanities tests deliberately target a range of these kinds of skills in order to get a good picture of the student’s overall ability. Scholarship and selection tests are designed in particular to assess the student’s skills at reasoning and interpreting texts and applying their understanding of the texts to solving problems. Knowing a little more about the ways that humanities

24

About the tests

questions target these different kinds of skills may help students think about their approach to answering questions and preparing for the test. Professionals working in the area of literacy development have considered lots of ways to think about the different categories of reading comprehension skills. One simple way of categorising the skills targeted by a humanities question is to think about whether the question asks the student to find information directly stated in the text, or whether the student needs to interpret the text in some way to answer the question. The first kind of question requires the student to go to the text or picture and locate or ‘retrieve’ a piece of information, something that is directly stated or displayed. The second type requires the student to interpret the information in the text or picture in order to answer the question. This second category can be further broken down depending on whether the student is interpreting from some directly stated information, or inferring an understanding even though the information is not directly stated. The diagram below sets out this simple framework.

Reading Text

Interpreting

Retrieving directly stated information

directly stated information

by making inferences

There is a certain amount of overlap between these categories and no question can test a single, isolated skill, but most questions in a humanities test could be fairly easily slotted into this framework.

Examples and answers The three questions in Example Unit 1 are of a similar level of difficulty, but finding an answer for each question brings different reading skills to the fore.

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Scholarship and Selection tests

Example Unit 1 The following two reviews of a new movie Nothing Left to Burn appeared in the Spring Hills High Gazette. Read the reviews and choose the best answer to the questions below. The movie sounded as if it would be a thrilling mystery, with kidnaps and twists, but the story was predictable and took no unexpected turns. The main character, Sonata, was interesting—she was a real drama queen—but the other characters were boring and predictable. This made the mystery easy to solve. I have enjoyed other movies directed by Natasha Mailman but this one was too simple to hold my attention. Maybe it was for younger kids. I give it one star. Callum Carmichael, Year 7 I enjoyed this movie. I thought the main character was clever. Sonata likes to be the centre of attention and she often is, because the rest of the characters can’t keep up with her. The story was really exciting and the audience is kept guessing until the very end. I think it is Natasha Mailman’s best movie yet! I give it four stars! Bree Shun, Year 8 Question 1 Who directed Nothing Left to Burn? A Sonata B Natasha Mailman C Callum Carmichael D Bree Shun Question 2 What did Bree think about the movie? A She thought it was sad. B She thought it was boring. C She did not know what was going to happen next. D She could easily tell what was going to happen next. Question 3 How did Callum feel about the movie when he had finished watching it? A excited B interested C embarrassed D disappointed

26

About the tests

Think about the simple categorisation of reading comprehension types discussed above. Which one of these could be described as ‘retrieving directly stated information’? Question 1 asks a factual, information type question, ‘Who directed the movie?’ To answer the question, the student goes to the text and finds the sentence ‘I have enjoyed other movies directed by Natasha Mailman but this one was too simple to hold my attention’ and retrieves the correct answer: B Natasha Mailman. By contrast, to answer the other two questions, the student needs to interpret some aspect of the text. Question 2 asks, ‘What did Bree think about the movie?’ To answer the question, the student goes to the text and finds a number of sentences and phrases that contain explicit expressions of Bree’s opinion of the movie: ‘I enjoyed this movie.’ ‘The story was really exciting and the audience is kept guessing until the very end.’ In interpreting these explicitly stated opinions, the student can determine that answer C is the correct option. This is the kind of process that is referred to as interpreting from directly stated information. Question 3 asks the student, ‘How did Callum feel about the movie when he had finished watching it?’ Although Callum never directly writes about how he felt at the end of the movie, the student can infer his feelings from the other things he says, for example: ‘The movie sounded as if it would be a thrilling mystery, with kidnaps and twists, but the story was predictable and took no unexpected turns.’ ‘I have enjoyed other movies directed by Natasha Mailman but this one was too simple to hold my attention.’ From this the student could infer that Callum did not feel excited, interested or embarrassed, but rather disappointed (D), even if he never says this directly. This is an example of what is referred to as interpreting by making inferences. On the following page is another example unit. As you answer the questions see if you can work out what type each question is.

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Scholarship and Selection tests

Example Unit 2 Read the following text and answer the questions below. Constellations are imaginary pictures people make in the night sky by joining stars together. The constellation Crux (Latin for cross) is the smallest of the constellations but also one of the most distinctive. It is more commonly known as the Southern Cross. Acrux, at the bottom of the cross, is the principal star in Crux and it is the 14th brightest star in the whole sky. In the past, explorers in the Southern Hemisphere used Crux to guide them. They used Crux to locate the South Pole because the Southern Hemisphere does not have a bright polar star. A line that is drawn from Gacrux through Acrux points south. Following this line for approximately 4.5 times the distance between the two stars gives a point that is almost directly over the South Pole. One advantage of using Crux to locate the South Pole is that Crux can be seen in the night sky for most of the year in the Southern Hemisphere. However, Crux cannot be seen from most places in the Northern Hemisphere.

Gacrux

Delta Crucis Hadar

Mimosa

Rigil Kentaurus

Acrux

The diagram above shows Crux and two other stars that are part of the nearby constellation Centaurus. These are the two pointer stars, Rigil Kentaurus and Hadar. They are often used to find Crux since a line drawn between these two stars points to Crux. Question 1 Southern Cross is another name for A Crux. B Acrux. C Gacrux. D Rigil Kentaurus.

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About the tests

Question 2 How does Crux help people to find the South Pole? A A line through the pointer stars points south. B A line from the top to the bottom of the cross points south. C A line between Gacrux and the pointer star Hadar points south. D A line between Mimosa and the pointer star Rigil Kentaurus points south. Question 3 Long ago people made up stories about the constellations, but there are few stories about Crux that come from people who lived in the Northern Hemisphere. What does the text suggest is the most likely reason for this? A The stars in Crux are not very bright. B Most of the people could not see Crux. C Crux does not resemble a person or an animal. D The cross shape can be made from many different stars.

Question 1 requires the student to retrieve directly stated information, ‘It is more commonly known as the Southern Cross.’ So the correct answer is A. Question 2 also requires the student to use directly stated information — in this case instructions on how to find the South Pole — but requires some interpretation because the correct answer, B, refers to the physical structure of the constellation (top and bottom) rather than the names of the stars which are used in the text. The student needs to read the text and match the information to the diagram to answer the question. Finally, Question 3 requires the student to both interpret and infer. The text doesn’t talk about the tradition of making up stories, but it does give a few clues that would allow the student to infer the correct answer B. From sentences and phrases such as ‘Crux cannot be seen from most places in the Northern Hemisphere’, ‘The constellation of Crux … is one of the most distinctive’ and ‘Acrux is the 14th brightest star in the whole sky’, the student could infer that not being able to see Crux is the likely reason that Northern Hemisphere people didn’t make up many stories about it, rather than it not being very bright or distinctive.

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Scholarship and Selection tests

Thinking about the different kinds of skills required to answer these different types of questions, it tends to be true that questions requiring interpretation by making inferences are harder than questions requiring interpretation of directly stated information, which in turn are harder than questions requiring the student to retrieve directly stated information. However, there are a number of factors influencing what makes a question easy or hard for any particular student, not just the type of skill required to answer it. It is also worth remembering that scholarship tests, being tests designed to assess a student’s ability to reason, interpret, explain, problem-solve and express ideas at a high level, tend to emphasise questions requiring interpretation and inference and tend to have questions and texts at a more difficult level.

Mathematics and Science Depending on the test and test level, most scholarship and selection tests have a multiple-choice section on mathematics or mathematics and science. The mathematics tests tend to focus on two different aspects of mathematics. The first aspect is how well the student can work with numbers, do calculations (add, subtract, multiply, divide), understand and make measurements, think about chance and probability and work with spatial ideas. In some curriculum documents these are the basic subject areas: number, measurement, space, chance and data, and algebra. The other aspect is how well the student can solve mathematical problems and apply mathematical ideas. In some curriculum documents this is referred to as ‘working mathematically’. In the worked examples given in the next section, you will see that often these two aspects are combined within the same unit and even within the same question. In particular, applying mathematical ideas and problem-solving often require calculations, measurements and estimates as the first step. For those tests and levels that also include science questions, there is a similar approach in that the questions test the students’ knowledge of science and their ability to ‘work scientifically’, applying scientific thinking to solve problems. Like humanities questions, mathematics and science questions can be independent or arranged in a unit, with a stimulus such as a diagram or a table, and several related questions.

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About the tests

Examples and answers Although they require some fairly difficult number calculations, the questions in the following example unit don’t really require any sophisticated problemsolving or application of mathematical or scientific knowledge.

Example Unit 1 The Great Artesian Basin is the world’s largest and deepest artesian basin. It underlies parts of four states, as follows: 673 000 square kilometres in Queensland, 216 000 square kilometres in South Australia, 130 000 square kilometres in New South Wales and 62 000 square kilometres in the Northern Territory. Question 1 The two states with the largest areas in the Great Artesian Basin together contain approximately what percentage of its total area? A 80 per cent B 70 per cent C 60 per cent D 50 per cent Question 2 Each day roughly 150 000 000 litres of water flows to the surface from the Great Artesian Basin. This means an average over the whole basin of approximately A 140 litres per square kilometre. B 280 litres per square kilometre. C 14 000 litres per square kilometre. D 28 000 litres per square kilometre.

Let’s take a look at the questions in more detail. Answering Question 1 requires a number of steps. The student needs to identify which are the two states with the largest areas in the basin. She needs to calculate their combined area. She needs to calculate the total area of the basin. Finally she needs to calculate what proportion of the basin these two states make up. These calculations require the student to use a range of number and measurement skills.

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Scholarship and Selection tests

As a parent who might have been educated in a traditional mathematics classroom your instinct might be to follow a process something like the following: 1. Find the total area of the Great Artesian Basin by adding together the four areas: 673 000 216 000 130 000 + 62 000 1 081 000 2. Identify the two largest areas — Queensland (673 000 square kilometres) and South Australia (216 000 square kilometres) — and add them together: 673 000 + 216 000 889 000 3. Determine the proportion of the whole made up by the top two areas by dividing the top two by the whole: 889 000 ÷ 1 081 000 0.82 0.82 is another way of expressing 82 per cent so option A is the best answer. Nowadays, children are taught to engage a range of problem-solving skills, and this is a key area assessed in scholarship and selection tests. In this case, rather than starting with this series of potentially tricky calculations, the student could begin by using their estimating skills to find the best answer or at least knock out some of the obviously wrong options and narrow down the field. Start by estimating the total area of the basin — about 700 000 plus about 200 000 plus about 100 000 plus about 100 000 equals just over 1 000 000. Then estimate the combined area of the top two states — about 700 000 plus about

32

About the tests

200 000 equals about 900 000. 900 000 out of 1 000 000 is 90 per cent so it seems pretty clear that the answer must be much more than 50 per cent, 60 per cent or 70 per cent. On that evidence the student might feel confident to choose option A as the best answer or might confirm her estimation with the series of more exact calculations presented above. If the student does then go back and do the precise calculations and comes up with 82 per cent, she would be more confident that her calculation was correct. On the other hand, if something goes wrong with the calculation and she ends up with a result of 40 per cent, she would know to check over her thinking (either her estimations or her additions and divisions) and try again. Estimation is a very important mathematical tool — especially when you consider that scholarship tests often allow only about one minute per question. Question 2 requires an understanding of how to calculate a ratio, in this case another potentially tricky long division calculation, dividing 150 000 000 litres by 1 081 000 square kilometres to come up with an answer of litres per square kilometre. If the student did proceed with the long-division calculation they would end up with the figure 139 litres per square kilometre. Option A is the closest so that is the best answer. On the other hand, using estimating skills the student might divide the amount of water — 150 000 000 litres or 150 million litres — by her estimate of the total Great Artesian Basin area — 1 000 000 square kilometres or 1 million square kilometres. A million divided by a million cancels down to 1 so the result must be something like 150. That makes options D and C look impossibly high. Options A and B are the only answers expressed in the hundreds and in fact option A is very close to the estimate of 150. Again, if a student had time, she might take both approaches as a way of confirming she has the right answer. The next unit has some simple examples of questions that require the student to work with numbers, do calculations, understand and make measurements, and make estimates, and to use those calculations to apply her understanding and solve some simple problems.

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Scholarship and Selection tests

Example Unit 2 Reuben is using a table to convert from an old unit called pounds to grams. Pounds

Grams

Pounds

Grams

0.1

45

1.1

495

0.2

90

1.2

540

0.3

135

1.3

585

0.4

180

1.4

630

0.5

225

1.5

675

0.6

270

1.6

720

0.7

315

1.7

765

0.8

360

1.8

810

0.9

405

1.9

855

1.0

450

2.0

900

Question 1 500 grams is closest to A 1.0 pounds. B 1.1 pounds. C 1.2 pounds. D 1.3 pounds. Question 2 Half a pound is closest to A 125 grams. B 225 grams. C 325 grams. D 425 grams. Question 3 Two pounds is closest to A 0.09 kilograms. B 0.9 kilograms. C 9.0 kilograms. D 90.0 kilograms.

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About the tests

For Question 1 the student needs to know how to use a table to look up a value and then to do some estimating or rounding off. A small twist is that when she looks at the table for 500 grams, she finds that there is no entry for 500. Her task is to find the closest entry. Thinking about close in terms of ‘a little more’ or ‘a little less’, the student might narrow the search down to 495 or 540 grams. Thinking more about which one of these is closest, the student should choose 495, which she can then convert to 1.1 pounds (best answer B). For Question 2 the student also has to look up a value in the table. The small twist in this one is that the values in the table are decimal whereas the question asks about ‘half’ a pound. That means that before the student can look up the answer, she has to understand that ‘half’ is the same as ‘0.5’. Once that’s solved, the student looks up 0.5 pounds and finds the value of grams, 225, which leads her to choosing the answer B. Question 3 also has a conversion task in it. This time the student needs to understand the relationship between grams and kilograms. Using the table, it’s easy enough to determine that 2 pounds is the equivalent of 900 grams. Unfortunately the possible answers given are reported in kilograms not grams. Before choosing an answer the student will have to convert 900 grams into kilograms. This of course requires the student to know something about the relationship between grams and kilograms. She might ‘know’ this as a fact (1000 grams equals 1 kilogram) or she may be able to infer it from her general knowledge of measurement terminology (i.e. the suffix ‘kilo-’ usually means a thousand, as in kilometre, kilojoule, kilobyte and kilogram). From this knowledge there are a number of ways to do the conversion. Three possibilities are: • convert the grams to kilograms by dividing the number of grams by 1000 • draw a number line with grams on one side and kilograms on the other to match 900 grams to 0.9 kilograms • understand that 900 grams is just slightly less than 1000 grams and that 1000 grams is a kilogram so the correct answer must be just slightly below 1 kilogram. Either way, the best answer looks like B and the student may well try a couple of these strategies to double check her answer. Just as with the reading comprehension questions, there are a lot of separate skills and understandings that the student needs to bring to answer these

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Scholarship and Selection tests

questions. Knowing how to do the basic calculations and having other mathematical and scientific knowledge is important, but so too is the ability to apply that knowledge to thinking out and solving problems.

Abstract Reasoning Depending on the test purpose and testing level, scholarship and selection tests may have an abstract reasoning component. This component assesses student ability to use non-verbal reasoning skills. Such reasoning is widely applicable across the curriculum, and beyond school, and is related to certain scholastic outcomes. Abstract items are particularly useful when assessment needs to be done independently of language skills. Abstract reasoning items require students to identify relationships and rules that underlie given sequences and patterns, and apply these to find the option (usually out of a choice of four or five) that most logically and simply fits next in a sequence or into a gap in a pattern. Abstract reasoning items require students to solve problems by identifying and applying patterns, rules and relationships. Generation of appropriate hypotheses and evaluation of evidence are important skills in such tasks. Elements in patterns are usually presented in diagrammatic form, but in some cases numbers or letters are used in the sequence or pattern. Two common types of item are ‘Next in Sequence’ and ‘Complete the Pattern’. A variant of the Next in Sequence type is ‘Middle of Sequence’. These are described in what follows.

Next in sequence For a sequence of four diagrams that change according to a particular rule or rules, it is necessary to identify the option that most logically comes next (i.e. the fifth diagram). Items can focus on the following: • progressive changes in size, shape, pattern and orientation • changes in the relationship between elements, such as relative position • numerical rules • a combination or disassociation of elements.

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About the tests

Middle of sequence This sequence follows the same rules as Next in Sequence but the five diagrams are given out of order and the correct order needs to be determined.

Complete the pattern For a diagram made of segments, it is necessary to identify the option that most logically fits into the blank segment area. Items can focus on the following: • analogy between parts of a pattern • reflection symmetry • progressive changes in size, shape, pattern and orientation • changes in the relationship between elements, such as relative position • numerical rules • geometric pattern completion • a combination or disassociation of elements. Abstract item difficulty can be varied according to the number, type, subtlety and complexity of elements, patterns, rules and relationships, and by combining item types.

Examples and answers Next in Sequence The four shapes below form a sequence going from left to right. From the four available options, you need to choose the shape that comes next in the sequence.

B

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The pattern has two simple elements, a cross and a dot, but can also be seen as a single combined element. The cross and dot together can be seen as rotating anticlockwise by 45 degrees from one shape to the next. Hence, the fifth shape in the sequence is given in Alternative D. Notice that the pattern can also be seen as the dot rotating anticlockwise by 45 degrees whilst the cross alternates between the vertical and diagonal positions, from one shape to the next. This interpretation leads to the same answer.

Complete the pattern The large square shape shown below contains nine smaller square shapes.

A

C

B

D

?

Look across the top row of three small squares from left to right. You should be able to see that the shapes within the first and second squares can join together to produce the shape in the right-hand square (i.e. two L-shapes join to produce a square). Similarly, across the second row of small squares, the shapes in the first and second squares can join together to produce the shape in the right-hand square (i.e. two half circles join together to produce a circle). The rule is that the shapes in the first and second squares from the left combine to produce the shape in the right-hand square.

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Now look across the bottom row of shapes. The shape within the middle square must combine with the shape in the left-hand square to produce the shape in the right-hand square. Since a triangle is in the right-hand square, the answer is A.

Written Expression Many scholarship and selection tests include one or two sections that require a response to an open-ended question. These sections are called ‘written expression’ or ‘writing’. In these sections there is usually a visual stimulus, such as a photo or cartoon, or written stimulus, such as a statement or a short passage from a novel or newspaper report, which the student will be asked to consider. The stimulus may include a combination of visual and written elements. The question will provide an instruction on how to complete the task. The task might require the student to write a short response (a few words or sentences) or a longer piece of writing (several sentences or paragraphs) depending on the level of the test. Often there is no specific length indicated, although usually a page or two of ruled A4 paper will be provided. It is more important to write well than to write a lot. Sometimes there are also some suggestions about what sort of things the student should consider in terms of style or approach. Typically in scholarship and selection tests there are one or two written expression questions that allow students to use different styles of writing to express an opinion, write a description, tell a story, relate a conversation, describe a scene or situation in poetry or prose, outline or explain something, express an opinion or make an argument. Below are some examples of questions.

Example 1 Stimulus

Rain, rain go away, Come again another day.

Instruction

Write a story about the weather.

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Example 2 Stimulus

Instruction

Use this picture as the basis for a piece of writing. You may write in any way you wish.

Example 3 Stimulus

Think of something about which you have a strong opinion. The issue could relate to some aspect of your home, school, community or society as a whole.

Instruction

Write an essay which could persuade somebody who does not share your opinion to change his or her mind and see things your way. Your writing will be judged on what you have to say, how well you organise and present your point of view and how clearly and effectively you express yourself.

What the test is looking for Generally speaking, the test is assessing the student’s ability to write in a clear, lively, vivid and expressive way that expresses her thoughts and feelings in words. It is important that the piece of writing is clearly a response to the stimulus and instruction and is not seen to be rehearsed or rehashed from a pre-prepared piece of writing. Writing pieces that are not closely based on the stimulus risk being penalised no matter how well written.

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About the tests

The following list outlines some of the issues that examiners may consider when marking written expression tests (ACER, 2012).

Thought and content The quality of what is said in the piece of writing. • What is made of and developed from the task. • The kinds of thoughts and ideas presented in response to the task.

Structure and organisation The quality of the structure and organisation developed to respond to the topic. • The shape and form of the writing piece. • The sequence and cohesion of the writing piece.

Expression, style and mechanics The quality of the language used to organise and present what is said. • The effectiveness and appropriateness of the language. • The expressiveness and fluency of the language. • The control of the ‘mechanics’ of English (grammar, punctuation, sentence structure). So, simply speaking, the examiners are looking for the quality of the ideas, the use of structure to present those ideas in a compelling and interesting way and the effectiveness and quality of the language used to deliver the ideas and structure. A student can get a good mark with a written piece that contains compelling and interesting ideas but has style deficiencies and some poor grammar — but an even better mark can be achieved if the grammar and style are excellent. The other way around is probably not true. No matter how wellcrafted and error-free the writing is, if it doesn’t contain any strong and interesting ideas and doesn’t relate to the task, it probably won’t score well.

A note on the examples The following sections contain some examples of common question types and example responses. These worked examples are intended to help you get an idea of the type of questions scholarship tests ask, as well as something about what the examiners are looking for in an answer.

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Please note that for clarity, the responses provided have been corrected for major errors of spelling and grammar. It would be unrealistic to expect all students to write in this error-free way under exam conditions. Note also that these responses are not intended to provide a ‘standard’ for what a student needs to produce in order to get a high score. The level and length of the writing produced by students differs considerably depending on the test and year level.

Examples and answers The following example is a typical written expression question. These responses are quite short and intended only to illustrate some of the issues discussed above.

Written Expression Example 1 Look at the following question and then read the three responses. Stimulus

Instruction

Use this picture as the basis for a piece of writing. You may write in any way you wish.

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Response 1 It is a room in an old house. The house is now a museum and people can go to see some interesting furniture and other items. In the corner of this room there is a grandfather clock, a rocking chair, a table with a book and some reading glasses, and a candle on the windowsill. There is a painting on the wall in a metal frame. The clock, chair and table are made of beautiful polished wood. The room is set up to show how a person long ago may have spent an evening relaxing in the chair and reading a book by candle light.

Response 2 I couldn’t wait until we arrived at the museum! Mum had packed the sandwiches and a drink and Rachel, my sister, had brought her camera so we could take pictures. We needed the pictures because Mr Wright had set us a project to complete. The topic was ‘Life in 1900’. When we got to the museum we bought our tickets and waited in line to get into the exhibition. I was hungry because I didn’t have any breakfast so Mum said why don’t we wait for the crowd to go down and eat our sandwiches straight away. We went to a little park right next to the museum to eat the sandwiches. The sandwiches were delicious! While we ate we talked about how exciting the exhibition would be. After the sandwiches we played with a ball that my sister had. We got very hot so we went across the road to get a drink from the shop. The sun was warm so we lay down in the shade to have a rest. After a while Mum woke us up and said it was time to go back to the museum. ‘No!’ I screamed as I saw the sign hanging up. ‘Closed.’ There was no use, the museum was closed on Saturday afternoon! Anyway, we went to the museum the next day and that’s when we took this great picture. I got an ‘A’ for the project!

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Response 3 That evening arriving back at the old house, it was quiet and lonely. Coming into the sitting room I could hear the gentle ticking of his clock rolling across the floor, calling out: ‘It’s time. It’s time.’ But no-one was coming tonight to keep the old clock company, to rock out the seconds, back and forth. No-one was coming to light the candle and cast a warm glow on the clock’s old face. Still the clock ticked: ‘It’s time. It’s time.’

Before getting to the responses, let’s take a look at the question. There is a picture — the stimulus — and an instruction. The instruction is quite broad. It asks that the student write a response related to the stimulus and says that any form of writing is acceptable. The three pieces of writing above are markedly different responses. None is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but you (and the examiners) may consider one or the other to be worth a higher or lower score. What do they have in common? Firstly, importantly, they all take the stimulus picture as the basis of the piece of writing. Another thing in common is that all three pieces are written in fluent and well-controlled English and use a range of appropriate vocabulary and syntax. The overall structure of the pieces is well-shaped and cohesive. What’s different? The first piece is a description of the picture, while the second and third are imaginative stories based on the picture as a stimulus. Another important difference is that while the second and third pieces take the stimulus as a starting point and then develop and express some ideas and feelings of the writer, the first piece really only describes what can be seen directly in the stimulus picture. Given that, think about how an examiner might score these responses according to the framework on page 41. All three pieces would probably score well on structure and organisation, and on expression, style and mechanics. In terms of thought and content, Response 1 probably wouldn’t score as highly as Response 2 or Response 3. This is not to suggest that imaginative writing will always score higher than descriptive writing. Rather, it’s important to understand that ‘accuracy’ of language is not all that is required of a response.

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Thinking again about Response 1, how could the student, having chosen to write in a descriptive style, have gained a higher score for thought and content? One way might have been to take a broader view, describe more of what is not seen in the picture. The piece does start to describe something about the broader setting, when the student writes, ‘The house is now a museum and people can go to see some interesting furniture and other items.’ Perhaps this aspect could be explored further: What else is in the museum? What is its purpose? Who goes there? Why is this part of the museum pictured? Why do we need museums like this? And so on. The student should think about her own thoughts, feelings, knowledge and experience of the world that can be brought to the writing so that the stimulus is the starting point for the piece of writing and not the only thing the writing addresses. Looking at Response 2 and Response 3, the strength of the pieces is not that they are imagined stories, but that the imagined stories have some lively and vivid ideas that create interest and draw the reader in. In terms of thought and content, although it is a very short piece, Response 3 is a very sophisticated piece of thinking and writing. In reading the piece, the reader is intrigued: Who is the narrator? Why does she feel so alone? Who is the person who usually sits in the chair? Why isn’t the person there tonight?

Written Expression Example 2 Look at the following question and then read the two responses on the following page. Stimulus

We live in a throwaway society. Nothing is built to last.

Instruction

Use this statement as the basis for a piece of writing. Your writing will be judged on: • what you have to say • how well you organise and structure what you have to say • how clearly and effectively you express yourself.

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Response 1 I very much agree with the statement that we live in a throwaway society. Firstly, everywhere you look you can see people throwing away rubbish, food containers, plastic bags and more. Students buy a new phone or iPod this week but by next week they already want a better one. Secondly, a long time ago only kings and queens had a lot of possessions. Ordinary people didn’t have much so they always looked after their things very carefully. If someone broke something they would take it to the repairer. Nowadays, if something is broken they just throw it away. Thirdly, now with modern technology we can make things cheaply in places like China. Even children can afford to buy lots of things just for fun and when they get bored they throw them away. That’s why they also think that nothing is built to last. So that’s why I agree that we live in a throwaway society.

Response 2 When people think of a throwaway society, they often think about the plastic bags, drink bottles and take-away containers that people throw in our streets, rivers and beaches. But the throwaway society is more than just rubbish in the street. Years ago the things we owned were built to last. Houses, cars and clothes were very expensive and they had to last for years. Now even things like computers and televisions are so cheap that it’s easier to buy a new one if they break than repair them. Even school children buy a new game or pair of trainers every time a new brand comes out and just throw away the old ones. Even people and friends are ‘easy come, easy go’. On Facebook people compete to see who has more friends even if you haven’t even met half the people. If you lose any of your real friends you can always get another hundred Facebook friends! Everything is getting much faster and new fashions and trends are always coming around the corner. If a kid says that your trainers aren’t any good, you ask your parents to buy a new pair even if they aren’t worn out. So this is why I believe firmly that we live in a throwaway society. If we want to leave something in this world for our grandchildren, we should think again about how we live.

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About the tests

In some ways, both of these responses are fairly similar. In both cases the writer has responded to the question with a fairly standard persuasive or argumentative style essay. Each essay uses paragraphs to arrange the ideas. The first paragraph introduces the topic and seeks to present the writer’s opinion. The next three or four paragraphs present an idea and then illustrate that idea. Finally, the last paragraph summarises and concludes. In terms of ideas, both of the essays try to make a similar argument: that just as we have come to see goods as disposable, so we have come to see other aspects of our lives as disposable. Each of the responses contains plenty of interesting ideas that the writer has brought to the topic and uses language in an appropriate, fluent and accurate way. Both writers have written a lot, and the writer of Response 1 has demonstrated significant knowledge of a broad sweep of history. One of the main differences between the two responses is what might be called the ‘thread’ of the argument. Looking in detail at the writing, Response 1 tries to make an argument based around a significant shift in behaviour and attitude from old times to modern times. The thread of the argument is that as material goods have become cheaper and more available through time, our general attitudes have become more and more short-term and disposable. The argument is illustrated in the table below: Paragraph 1

Introduction

Paragraph 2

Rubbish

Paragraph 3

Old times vs. modern times

Paragraph 4

Cheap throwaway goods

Paragraph 5

Conclusion

The writer uses a lot of explicit structural markers (‘firstly’, ‘secondly’, etc.) although it’s not so clear that each of these paragraphs introduces a new supporting idea for the argument. Paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 essentially make the same point — nowadays people are willing to throw things away because they are cheap and plentiful. It’s also not clear that the conclusion is drawn from the evidence presented. By contrast, Response 2 makes this argument about cheap material goods fairly succinctly in just one paragraph, and then goes on to pursue the theme as

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it appears in other areas of our lives. In fact the thread of the argument in Response 2 is more that the disposability of goods is a metaphor for many changes that have occurred in our society. Paragraph 1

Introduction

Paragraph 2

Material goods

Paragraph 3

Relationships

Paragraph 4

Culture and ideas

Paragraph 5

Conclusion

So although on the surface Response 1 uses paragraphs and structural markers in a fairly standard way to provide structure to the writing, the ideas in the essay lack overall organisation and development. By contrast, the writer of Response 2 has thought about the central argument she wants to make — ‘the throwaway society is more than just rubbish in the street’ — and how to support it with arguments and examples. Each of the key arguments is presented in a paragraph with supporting evidence. Finally, the conclusion does much more than mechanically summarise the argument by attempting to frame the importance and value of what has been argued.

Tips for students writing test responses • Think before you write. Don’t try to make it up as you go along. • Don’t try to do too much. Keep track of the time. • Look for something definite to say. • Try to give the piece a direction that unfolds or develops. Try to think of the piece as a whole. • Try to write what you know and feel. Be honest and tell the truth. • Don’t try to repeat stories from other sources. • Don’t go too far and make your writing exaggerated or highly dramatic, but try to find precise or vivid words when they are appropriate. • Keep the reader in mind. It will be an adult, and that should influence what you write and how you write it.

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About the tests

Case study: Anglican Church Grammar School, Brisbane, Queensland The Anglican Church Grammar School, ‘Churchie’, is an independent boys’ school catering to about 1800 students from Reception to Year 12, including around 160 boarders. Churchie comprises the Preparatory School for students from Reception to Year 6; the Middle School for Years 7, 8 and 9; and the Senior School for Years 10, 11 and 12. Churchie offers cooperative testing for students seeking scholarships for entry into Years 7, 8, 10 and 11. Each year, approximately 80 students sit the scholarship test. On average, the school offers fewer than 10 scholarships per year. The school offers full and partial scholarships to cover between 25 and 100 per cent of the fees for attending the school from Year 7 entry to the end of Year 12. The school sets its own cut-off score for scholarship consideration. Students who achieve above the cut-off are almost certain to be offered scholarships, while students who do not reach the cut-off are very unlikely to be considered. Deputy Headmaster (Academic), Dr Dirk Wellham, explains the school’s scholarship selection process. ‘We rely on the scholarship test for awarding all of our academic scholarships,’ Dr Wellham says. ‘We’ve got a reasonably high cut-off score, and because we very rarely go below the cut-off, the number of scholarships we offer may change from year to year. This year we offered relatively few scholarships for students going into Year 7 next year,’ Dr Wellham explains. The school’s scholarship test cut-off score applies to students’ overall scores across all sections of the test; however, the school may make an exception to the cut-off score if a student has scored exceptionally well in one section of the test. ‘We have found that literacy performance is a key determiner of academic performance, so we do look very closely at that result,’ Dr Wellham says. ‘But, some students, for example, some students with English as a second language, may do very well in numeracy, but not so well in

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literacy, and therefore they don’t reach our cut-off. We do occasionally offer a scholarship to a student who is below our cut-off based on the quality of a numeracy result, where we believe the student has a strong work ethic and we can support him to develop his literacy skills,’ he says. While Churchie selects students for scholarship consideration based solely on the results of the scholarship test, the school also looks at students’ school reports, meets the student and parents and considers financial need and other individual circumstances when deciding what percentage of scholarship to offer individual students. ‘If a student does well on the scholarship test, we’re going to talk to him about a scholarship. We might then fine-tune what we offer an individual student based on other factors. We tend to offer the topperforming boys scholarships to cover 50 or 75 per cent of the fees, because we want the parents to contribute to our school as well, in partnership — but we do also offer full scholarships,’ Dr Wellham says. ‘One excellent example from recent years is a boy who entered the school at Year 10 on a 100-per-cent scholarship, which we offered because he was a high-quality student who came from a supportive family with a single mother on a low income. That scholarship made the difference of getting him into our school, and that boy went on to become Dux of the school,’ he says. The school conducts annual reviews of the attitude, effort and academic performance of scholarship recipients. The school also monitors scholarship recipients’ final year results, in Queensland referred to as Overall Position (OP). Students’ OPs indicate their rank in an order of all Queensland students based on their overall achievement in Year 12 subjects. Students are placed in one of 25 bands from the highest, OP1, which represents the top two per cent of students in the state, through to the lowest, OP25. Dr Wellham says that Churchie has found the scholarship test to be a good predictor of students’ final year performance. ‘Our scholarship boys’ OP mean is 3.5, across 130 or so scholarship recipients who have graduated from Churchie over the past 12 years,’ he says.

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Chapter 3 Developing skills and abilities

This chapter provides a whole range of advice that may be helpful for a student to prepare for a scholarship or selection test. Each student will develop at a different rate, have a different learning style and have an individual set of interests and abilities — just as each parent will. As mentioned in the Introduction, many parents feel they need strong advice and clear instructions on how to help their child prepare. This section of the book in particular takes a direct tone, rather than couching statements in qualifications and disclaimers. For simplicity’s sake, it is more likely to say, ‘Read to your child’ than to say, ‘There is some evidence that reading to your child may have a positive effect on your child’s literacy levels, although this is the subject of some debate in the academic community.’ Having said that, the aim of this chapter is not to tell you what to do, but to provide students and parents with a variety of ideas, from which you may choose those which resonate with you. Preparing for a scholarship or selection test will be a long-term effort, for student and for parents. As covered in earlier chapters, many scholarship and selection tests do not assess students’ knowledge of the school curriculum content. Short-term ‘cramming’ or rote learning of facts and figures will not help students to perform better in a scholarship or selection test. What many scholarship and selection tests do measure is students’ aptitude for problem-solving, reasoning, creative thinking, comprehension, interpretation and applying known concepts to new situations. These abilities cannot be developed by

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practice in the mechanical aspects of reading and routine mathematical processes, but they can be developed over time. Children aren’t born with a fixed amount of reading comprehension, problem-solving or ability to reason mathematically. They require exposure to a culture of learning; to be immersed in a variety of ageappropriate and engaging stimuli; and to be encouraged to think deeply about and freely discuss their learning. Parents can be an integral part of this process. While the suggestions in this chapter are relevant for students working on their own, much of it is addressed to parents trying to help their children develop thinking skills and abilities. Developing these abilities will assist a student not only in a scholarship or selection test, but also in her general schooling, and indeed throughout life.

How you can help your gifted child Gifted and talented children may have special needs in one or more aspects of their development and may experience a number of special stresses and difficulties. These may include: • extra pressure from parents and teachers to be continually successful • increased fear of failure and a sense of failure when not ‘perfect’ • expectations that they will spend unusual amounts of time practising their special skills such that they do not have normal play and recreation time • developing high demands and expectations of others • frustration caused by having skills at different stages of development (e.g. having advanced cognitive skills but only ‘normal’ for age handwriting skills) • difficulties in gaining access to a challenging level of education appropriate to their needs • inappropriate preschool or school curriculum and/or placement • difficulties relating to other children of the same age and finding same age friends • confusion in choosing a career for the child who is gifted in many areas. The stresses sometimes experienced by gifted and talented children may lead to a number of problems, including: • deliberately not doing as well as they can, in an effort to hide their differences

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Developing skills and abilities • emotional difficulties, such as depression, stress, anxiety • increased emotional intensity and sensitivity (including outbursts of temper or tears) • boredom in a normal classroom situation (which can lead to school refusal and/or behavioural problems) • limited social interaction and social development. Generally speaking, parents of gifted and talented children should simply do what all parents need to do — respond consistently to their children’s individual needs and interests whilst staying flexible as their children’s needs change over time. It follows that many of the ideas below are applicable to all children, gifted or not. Try to: • Provide your child with lots of opportunities to learn and try new things. • Make sure that your child has some things to do that she finds challenging, as well as some that she likes and can do easily. • Encourage your child to participate in a broad range of educational and recreational activities. • Support your child with both their successes and their failures. • Help your child to develop skills needed to relate to friends who may not be gifted and talented. • Talk with your child about her particular talents, what it means to be gifted and ways to deal with any difficulties that may arise. • Teach and encourage the social skills that will enable your child to fit comfortably into her social world. Being gifted is not an excuse for bad behaviour. Try not to: • Push or place undue pressure on your child. • ‘Show-off’ your child or talk a lot about her in public. • Expect your child to be gifted and talented in all areas of her development. • Be too ‘bossy’ in your parenting. • Forget that your gifted child is still a child, and has all the normal needs of children, including the need for love, support, stability, routine and fun.

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Scholarship and Selection tests All children will do their best in an area of their interest, when they have skills and they are encouraged to practise and enjoy themselves. Trying to make your child succeed at something which does not interest the child and where the child cannot reach the standard expected can be harmful to both child and parent. (Information reproduced with permission from the Government of South Australia, Women’s and Children’s Health Network, 2011, sections 8 and 10. Please see for more information.)

Practice tests and private tutoring Some parents assume, or are convinced by other parents or peers, that students will fail the test if they aren’t subjected to cramming or rigorous external coaching. This is not true. Some practice tests and some tutoring may be beneficial — but these methods should be treated with caution. Practice tests and sample materials will enable your child to practise basic skills, to become familiar with the style of questions and to practise working to a time limit. Completing a practice test may help your child to identify the areas in which she is already competent, and the areas that need further development. When practising, ensure you are using the most up-to-date materials for the particular test she will sit. Practice tests, sample questions and other preparation materials are usually available for purchase from testing agencies. For information, see the appendices at the end of this book. Repeatedly sitting practice tests is unlikely to be the best preparation for a scholarship or selection test. Sitting a practice test may assist your child to become familiar with the testing experience, and may increase your child’s confidence and decrease her nerves, but it probably won’t increase your child’s academic aptitudes. Encourage your child to practise more than answering questions — help her to prepare planning strategies as well, such as planning the way she organises work and structures answers in the written expression tasks. Advise your child against memorising sample questions or answers. This is a waste of time. Practice tests contain examples; these will not be the questions your child will be asked in the test.

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Many scholarship and selection tests will not require your child to know factual information beyond what would normally be expected of a student in that year level, but your child will need to be able to analyse information .

provided in the test and to apply this knowledge to new situations and problems. Test developers and markers warn against excessive private tutoring and against pre-preparation of written expression pieces. Test markers have commented that they can often tell when students have pre-prepared answers before the test, as writing is often off-task, doesn’t correctly follow the instructions or doesn’t adequately address the stimulus material. These responses will not score well.

Private tutoring checklist Private tutoring or coaching is by no means essential for your child to perform at her best. In fact, some test developers, test markers and schools discourage private tutoring. However, if you wish to consider private tutoring, some useful questions to ask may be: • Will this tutoring give your child transferable skills that can be used apart from the scholarship or selection test, such as problem-solving skills or interview skills? • How familiar is the tutor or agency with the particular test your child plans to sit? • What methods does the tutor or agency use? Repeated sitting of practice tests or revision of work your child completes in school may not be the most useful m ­ ethods of preparation. • What claims does the tutor or agency make? Are these realistic? Can they be substantiated? Be wary of anyone advertising ‘too good to be true’ claims or promising success — no child sitting a scholarship or selection test is guaranteed a place.

Thinking This book has been emphasising that many scholarship and selection tests will not expect your child to have memorised slabs of text, tables of figures or batches of mathematical formulae. It has used terms such as ‘thinking’, ‘comprehending’, ‘problem-solving’ and ‘reasoning’ — but rather than take for

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granted that everyone understands the same thing by each of these terms, this section aims to describe thinking in more detail by explaining some modern theories of thinking, cognition and learning. This is by no means an exhaustive list of educational or cognitive theory, and if you are interested in learning more about these and other theories, see the ‘References’ section at the end of this book for further reading. The following sections describe some different theories that aim to better explain what thinking is and how it can best be developed. Not every aspect of every theory will resonate with every student or be applicable to every student’s style of learning, but by understanding the concepts and using some of the ideas covered in this chapter, you may become more aware of your particular patterns of learning, which may help to broaden your thinking skills base.

Higher-order thinking The type of thinking that many scholarship and selection tests aim to assess is sometimes called higher-order thinking or critical thinking. Higher-order thinking goes beyond rote learning: it assumes that memorising something is not the same as thinking about it. Students can be taught to memorise things — facts, formulae, quotes from a book — without understanding them. Rote learning requires a student to memorise and parrot back facts and figures. It’s the skill of a robot programmed to perform a routine function, but unable to use the information to think for itself. Higher-order thinking requires more cognitive processing, and is more difficult to learn and to teach than rote learning, but it also has a much wider application. Higher-order thinking enables us to understand pieces of information; connect them to each other; relate new information to existing knowledge; to organise and categorise information; and to fit pieces of information together in novel ways to create new solutions to problems. Understanding the processes involved in higher-order thinking can be a good start to a student’s development of these skills. Higher-order thinking skills are necessary in order to perform the sorts of tasks that will be expected of a student in a scholarship or selection test.

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Essentially, higher-order thinking can be seen as a two-step process: the first step is that we are exposed to content, basic data, and we absorb it and store it; the second step is that we turn this data into information, ideas, concepts, principles and theories, which we apply as relevant in new situations to solve new problems.

Thinking curriculum The concept of a ‘thinking curriculum’, a term first coined by Lauren Resnick in 1989, acknowledges that while there is a body of knowledge that students should have an understanding of if they are to be considered educated, and that students must have a solid grasp of foundation knowledge on which to base new information for any form of learning to occur, it is also vital that students develop the ability to think for themselves if they are to succeed beyond the school context. The thinking curriculum models learning around ideas generated by students; links substantive, real-world problems to curriculum content; ensures that children achieve deep knowledge and understanding; and fosters higherorder thinking through the use of technology, creativity, the visual arts and mathematical and scientific ideas (Resnick, 1989).

A tip from Thomas Edison Highly creative people sometimes give ‘wrong’ answers to strictly defined questions because they view the problem from a different perspective. Creative intelligence is the driving force behind invention and innovation. Thomas Edison experimented with more than 2000 different models before getting the light bulb right. When a journalist asked him how it felt to fail so many times, Edison replied, ‘I never failed once. I invented the light bulb. It just happened to be a 2000-step process.’

Multiple Intelligences The theory of Multiple Intelligences is another model designed to account for the different ways that people learn. This theory, developed in 1983 by Dr Howard Gardner, professor of education at Harvard University, starts from the position that the conventional concept of intelligence is too narrow and that IQ tests and traditional education highlight only a limited set of skills, when the

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range of human potential is much broader. The theory proposes that education which encompasses a wide variety of methods and learning activities will appeal to and benefit a wider range of students, not just those with strong verbal and logical skills. Further, it claims that students who are weak in some areas, such as verbal and logical skills, will better develop these skills if necessary information is presented in a new way. According to the theory of Multiple Intelligences, we each demonstrate a combination of strengths and weaknesses across the areas. Intelligences are not isolated from each other; one activity may engage several areas, and areas can interact to complement or interrupt each other (Gardner, 1983). All children have all intelligences, and their intelligence profile is not fixed; rich learning experiences can develop various intelligences. The theory of Multiple Intelligences emphasises that learners weak in some areas are not lacking in intelligence, but may simply be stronger in other areas. It also aims to help tailor learning experiences for students that make use of all the areas of intelligence. This doesn’t mean you need to find eight ways to convey each piece of information to your child. It does mean that you should create rich learning activities that engage her particular strengths, help her to develop in any areas in which she may not be as strong and allow her to learn across several areas at once.

Gardner’s Eight Multiple Intelligences Verbal–linguistic intelligence has to do with the written and spoken word. If your child likes to read, write and tell stories, has an interest in foreign languages and is good at memorising words, facts, names, dates and trivia, she has strong verbal–linguistic intelligence. Learning activities structured around reading, taking notes, listening to lectures and storytelling should suit your child’s learning style. She may enjoy cementing her own learning by teaching others, so encourage her to explain what she has learned to you. Logical–mathematical intelligence involves the propensity towards reasoning, abstract pattern recognition, classification, experimentation, investigation and calculation. If your child enjoys number problems, chess or computer programming, she probably has strong logical–mathematical intelligence. Learning activities structured around complex calculations, formulas, drills, problem-solving and theorising should suit your child’s learning style.

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Developing skills and abilities Visual–spatial intelligence often manifests as strong visual or ‘photographic’ memory, a good sense of direction or artistic talent. If your child enjoys drawing or building, plays with machines, likes mazes or is good at reading maps, she is displaying strong visual– spatial intelligence. Learning activities structured around puzzles, three-dimensional objects, multimedia presentations and creating artwork should suit her learning style. Bodily kinaesthetic intelligence focuses on physical action and movement. People with strong bodily kinaesthetic intelligence often talk with their hands, like to make things with their hands, have good dexterity and balance and enjoy sports or performing arts. If your child has strong bodily kinaesthetic intelligence, she may learn well through doing. Try hands-on learning activities such as dancing or acting out concepts, making models, seeing a play or visiting an interactive science museum. People strong in interpersonal intelligence are good at interacting with others. They are often extroverted, good at communication, empathy and teamwork. If your child is strong in interpersonal intelligence, she may learn best through sharing, cooperating, discussion and debate. Help her to find mentors, and encourage her to invite friends over for study sessions and to join clubs and groups. In contrast, people strong in intrapersonal intelligence are typically introspective and selfreflective. If your child displays a high level of self-awareness, is a perfectionist and enjoys philosophy or abstract thought, she may prefer learning activities that allow her to set her own goals; to complete individual, self-paced projects that emphasise personal growth; and to reflect on her learning through meditative tasks such as journal writing. People strong in musical–rhythmic intelligence often take easily to singing, playing musical instruments and composing music. If your child is forever drumming on the kitchen table or humming a tune out loud, she is likely to be strong in this intelligence. People with musical–rhythmic intelligence remember information that they hear. Information presented through lectures or songs may be absorbed well. Encourage your child to attend lectures, read information aloud to her and make up songs, rhythms or rhymes to help her remember information. Naturalistic intelligence refers to an affinity to nature and skill in nurturing. If your child likes to be outside, loves animals, is good at gardening or has an interest in geography or the weather, she is displaying naturalistic intelligence. She will be likely to enjoy learning activities like keeping an aquarium or terrarium, nature walks, and visiting the zoo or the botanical gardens. Abstract concepts may not appeal to her, and she is more likely to understand and retain information if she can see how it relates to the real world. (adapted from Gardner, 1983)

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Sustained shared thinking Sustained shared thinking is a concept defined by a group of researchers investigating early childhood education in the United Kingdom (Sylva et al., 2007). Their study aimed to investigate the quality of the home learning environment. The study found, not surprisingly, that parents’ involvement in their children’s education has a significant effect on those children’s achievement and engagement. The study found that the practice of sustained shared thinking has the strongest positive effect on children’s engagement and achievement. According to the study: • Sustained shared thinking occurs when two or more individuals work together in an intellectual way to solve a problem, clarify a concept, evaluate an activity, extend a narrative and so forth. Both parties must contribute to the thinking and it must develop and extend the understanding. • Sustained shared thinking can be achieved by working with your child one-on-one and involving her in active conversations, encouraging her to initiate her own topics, freely offer information and ideas and speculate about possibilities. This process hinges on the quality of adult–child interaction. Try to let your child initiate her own learning activities. You can extend the intellectual challenge of an activity once she has initiated it. You may find it challenging at first to find a balance where you become immersed in your child’s learning activity without leading or dominating it. Some of the following strategies may help. • Respect your child’s choices. If you ask your child what she wants to do, and then ignore her suggestion, she’s unlikely to engage in whatever happens next. • Listen carefully. Tune in to what your child is saying and doing. • Limit questioning. Sometimes parents bombard their child with questions in an effort to be involved — but this may have the opposite effect if it makes your child feel that she’s being interrogated or quizzed. • Make your questions count. When you do have to ask, use open-ended questions that leave room for your child to describe and speculate. A simple example is just to ask ‘What do you think about this?’ rather than ‘Do you

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like this?’ Open-ended questions allow your child to explore her thinking aloud and are more likely to result in higher-order thinking than are closed yes or no questions. • Try positive questioning. When your child asks you something, extend her thinking by reflecting the question back. Try questions such as, ‘That’s an interesting question. What do you think?’ or ‘How do you think we could find out the answer to that question?’ • Encourage elaboration. Use statements like: ‘I really want to know more about this.’ • Use body language. Physically demonstrate that your child has your attention by sustaining eye contact, smiling and nodding. It may seem obvious, but it is a good way to show you are interested without dominating conversation. Also try to be aware of your child’s body language, as well as her speech. • Clarify. Summarise your child’s thoughts, and reflect her use of language. Repeat words and phrases and restate her ideas. • Give your child time. Leave short pauses after breaks in her speech. She may not have finished her thought, and a pause gives her thinking time and space to continue speaking or to ask a question. Remember to use your body language though, so she knows you’re still listening. • Make information relevant. When you share information, try not to lecture. Personalise factual information with examples from your own experience. • Make suggestions. Tone and phrasing both make the difference between a suggestion and an order. Suggesting ‘You might want to try doing it this way’ is more respectful than commanding ‘Do it this way.’ And, no matter how involved — or frustrated — you may get, avoid saying, ‘Don’t do it that way’, ‘Do it my way’, or worst of all, ‘Here, just let me do it.’ • Lead by example. Rather than presenting your decisions and conclusions as faits accomplis, model your own thinking so your child can see how you got there. Essentially, think out loud. • Praise wisely. Be specific in your compliments, otherwise they risk being insipid. Use your praise to further extend your child’s thinking. For example, rather than just saying, ‘That’s a pretty drawing’, explore artistic technique by commenting, ‘The use of colour is really interesting’, or ‘The sense of depth must have been challenging to achieve’ and leave your child room to respond.

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• Share goals. Discuss your child’s educational goals with her, and with her school and teachers. The UK study found that when children, parents and staff shared information about the child’s education, children were engaged and parents were able to support their children at home with learning activities that complemented their school experiences. Sustained shared thinking is difficult to do, and requires much practice and self-awareness on the part of the parent. The benefit for your child is worth the effort, though: according to the UK study, sustained shared thinking significantly extends children’s emotional and cognitive development.

Six Thinking Hats The strategy of the Six Thinking Hats, originally developed by Edward de Bono (1985) as a tool for business decision-making and teamwork, has been adapted for use in education. The strategy defines six states, types or angles of thinking, each symbolised by a different colour. Students work through a topic or problem, putting on each hat — either actually or figuratively — as they address the topic from each different angle. Using this strategy may assist a student to brainstorm ideas and information, to problem-solve and to reflect on her thinking process. Like the Multiple Intelligences theory, the Six Thinking Hats strategy aims to get a student using a range of thinking skills. • The white hat symbolises neutrality and statements of fact. When a student does ‘white hat thinking’ she should identify the facts, figures and details, consider what information is available and identify what information is needed. • The red hat represents emotion and intuition. ‘Red hat thinking’ allows a student to articulate her gut reactions and feelings about a topic or problem, without having to justify these. This type of thinking is useful for making a shortlist from a range of options and for identifying hunches that may be supported with logic during later thinking phases. • The black hat denotes constructive criticism. This angle of thinking explores the problems with a topic or proposal; identifies flaws, risks and obstacles; and exercises judgement and caution. Unlike the red hat phase, this phase should involve logical thinking. In this phase, a student can identify

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problems without the obligation to provide solutions. This type of thinking comes naturally to many people. A key benefit of the Six Thinking Hats strategy is that this type of thinking has its place, but once the ‘black hat thinking’ phase is exhausted, criticisms should not be made during any other phase of the process. Similarly, try not to solve problems during the black hat phase — that comes later. • The yellow hat stands for positivity. ‘Yellow hat thinking’ focuses on the positive aspects of a topic, problem or proposal. It is not hope or blind optimism — statements must still be logical and based on fact. Yellow hat thinking allows a student to list the reasons in favour of an idea. • The green hat embodies creativity. ‘Green hat thinking’ is the phase of lateral thinking, brainstorming new ideas, identifying new possibilities, inventing, making suggestions, creating alternatives and problem-solving the challenges identified by black hat thinking. This phase should generate a range of ideas without passing judgement. • The blue hat symbolises metacognition. ‘Blue hat thinking’ is about reflection, the big picture and thinking about our thinking. In the blue hat phase, a student can revisit the purpose of the project or activity, organise the process, make decisions, summarise, review and draw conclusions. You might ask your child questions like, ‘What is the focus of this project?’, ‘What have we achieved so far?’, ‘What thinking still needs to be done?’, ‘What hat might we need for that?’ and ‘What have we learned?’ Six Hat thinking can be applied to most topics, problems or activities. You don’t always have to use all the hats, and you don’t have to use them in any particular order. As a simple example to illustrate the process, let’s say your young child is reading the book Woolvs in the Sitee by Margaret Wild, which is quite a sophisticated text in its use of language, illustration and content. Your child’s red hat responses to the book might be, ‘I like the character of Ben’, ‘The pictures are cool’, ‘The spelling is confusing’, or ‘This book made me feel lonely.’ White hat thinking might allow her to expand on the elements of missing information, such as, ‘There are wolves in the title but not in the text’, or ‘Something bad has happened to the world in the book, but it’s not clearly stated, so I’m not sure what.’ Black and yellow hat thinking would allow her to use logic to explain

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why she liked and didn’t like aspects of the book. All of the earlier ideas might be explored using green hat thinking: ‘I think the spelling is supposed to make me want to read out loud’; ‘Maybe the people are the wolves’; ‘Maybe the world in the book went through a war, or a natural disaster.’ Blue hat thinking might be a reflection on what the book taught your child, or a comparison of this book to other books she has read. The key to using Six Hats thinking effectively is to break down different styles of thinking, to separate the processes and cycle through each hat purposefully. The strategy should teach your child to concentrate clearly on each approach to ensure a thorough and rounded exploration of the topic or problem.

Reading Reading may be one of the best ways a student can develop the skills that scholarship and selection tests target. Your home environment has a significant impact on your family’s literacy and language development, which in turn has an impact on academic performance. Reading widely will help a student expand her vocabulary, learn information about the world, engage in imagination and deal with complex ideas. It may also familiarise her with the ways in which different writers express thoughts, ideas, characters and plots, and so improve her writing skills. Parents’ involvement in their children’s reading practices at home positively affects children’s educational achievement. This effect is strongest if parents take an interest in their children’s ability to read and enjoyment of reading from early childhood — but it is never too late to get involved. Most students who sit for scholarship or selection tests are high-achieving students. It is likely, then, that your child is already an avid reader. There are still ways in which you can help your child further improve her skills in reading comprehension. A high-achieving student needs not just to read, but to think about and discuss what she is reading. Reading is about much more than stringing a series of words together; it is about making sense of text in all its complexity, according to Michael Pressley (2001), education professor and expert in reading literacy. As he explains in his

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paper Comprehension Instruction: What makes sense now, what might make sense soon, comprehension requires a reader to master a range of subtle skills. Good readers are aware of why they are reading a text; gain an overview of the text before reading; make predictions about the upcoming text; read selectively based on their overview; associate ideas in text to what they already know; note whether their predictions and expectations about text content are being met; revise their prior knowledge when compelling new ideas conflicting with prior knowledge are encountered; figure out the meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary based on context clues; underline, reread, make notes and paraphrase to remember important points; interpret the text; evaluate its quality; review important points as they conclude reading, and think about how ideas encountered in the text might be used in the future. Young and less skilled readers, in contrast, exhibit a lack of such activity. (Pressley, 2001) There are many strategies you can employ to encourage your child to develop reading skills. The key is to concentrate on reading activities that your child enjoys, so that reading is seen as fun, not as hard work. Some suggestions are given below: • Teach by example. Reading books, magazines or newspapers in front of your child can set a powerful example. When your child sees you reading on a regular basis for pleasure, she should understand that you value reading, and may model her behaviour accordingly. • Create an environment in which reading is a natural, spontaneous and important activity. Share information and opinions about what you are reading, and generate opportunities to share reading with your child. Read items aloud from the newspaper at the breakfast table and discuss these in a casual way; cook with your child, encouraging her to read recipes and the labels on ingredients; talk about family history and produce a genealogy chart together; play audio books in the car. Make reading aloud a normal part of family life. Your child is learning from you all the time, not just when you sit down for a formal lesson. • Read to and with your child. Take turns reading aloud. If you have more than one child, start a tradition of siblings reading to each other. Hearing you read and reading aloud may improve your child’s fluency and

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expression. Make reading together a non-judgemental, casual, non-stressful activity; your child may learn to associate reading with warm feelings of family bonding and support. • Discuss the material you read together with your child. Talk about characters, settings, plot, themes, social issues and language. If you come across a word your child doesn’t know, encourage her to determine what it might mean in the context of the surrounding text. Look the word up in a dictionary. Introduce your child to your favourite novels and explore why these books are special to you. • Keep a variety of reading material around the house, and notice what your child reads. Expose your child to a range of text types and genres, and challenge her to engage with materials in new ways. Read a headline from a newspaper or magazine, or the heading from a book chapter and ask your child to anticipate what the following text will be about, then read on to see how accurate her predictions were. Analyse a political cartoon from a newspaper together, debating each other’s interpretations of the image, and backing this up by articulating the inferences that you each have made to find meaning in the graphic. Encourage your child to acknowledge if she doesn’t understand something she has read. Discuss how texts can be complicated if the reader doesn’t have adequate context, and ask your child how she might go about building an understanding. • Try to strike a balance between helping your child choose engaging, ageappropriate reading materials, and giving her freedom to choose for herself. If you have a mature teenaged child, acknowledge this maturity by suggesting appropriate adult-level reading material. Don’t dictate what she should read, but try to encourage her to read across a range of text types and genres. Read the same books as your child reads. • Designate a bookshelf in the house for your child, and ensure she has a quiet, peaceful place to read. • Take your child to bookshops, and browse together or separately. Giving an older child a bookshop allowance, gift certificate or subscription to a magazine will allow her to choose according to personal taste and interest, and may encourage the attitude that reading is a gift.

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• Visit libraries regularly and ensure your child has a valid borrowing card. Check if the library has a book club and consider joining up. If the local library doesn’t excite your child, try a visit to a university library. • Find out from your child or from your child’s school which texts are being covered in class. Discuss your child’s reading strengths and areas for improvement with the class teacher. Get advice from teachers on the best way to support your child’s literacy development. Volunteer for classroom literacy programs. • Play games. Invest in board games and puzzles that challenge your child to think outside the box, improve pattern recognition and vocabulary, use visual learning cues and make learning fun. Try word games, picture drawing or pattern recognition games, chess, crosswords and number puzzles. • Be aware of what your child is watching on television and viewing on the Internet. Many people, especially from younger generations, get much of their information and entertainment from non-print media, and it would be naive and counterproductive to underestimate the ways in which television and the Internet can have a positive impact on your child’s learning. • Encourage your child to view television shows and internet materials that teach the viewer something, introduce new ideas or perspectives and encourage her to listen and question. If your child likes a book that has been adapted into a movie, allow her to watch the movie; similarly, encourage your child to find books that explore the themes of the television shows that she engages with. • As with reading, try to participate in your child’s television watching or Internet surfing. Discuss and ask questions about what you view together. Explore what the material has taught your child.

Reading comprehension skills The written words themselves furnish only some of the information that a reader requires to comprehend a text. The reader needs to supply the rest. Much of the meaning of a text comes from how an author expresses ideas, or from what is not said. Authors imply; therefore, readers must learn to infer.

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Scholarship and Selection tests Accomplished readers make use of a range of skills to develop understanding. These may include the ability to: • understand paragraph structure and grammatical conventions • guess the meaning of unknown words from the context of surrounding text • read inferentially, ‘between the lines’, making logical deductions and conclusions, and noticing hints and omissions made by the writer • identify characters’ beliefs, personalities, motivations and relationships to one another • anticipate what may happen next in the text • provide explanations for events or ideas that are presented in the text • recognise the author’s perspective, with an awareness of the author’s or narrator’s assumptions, beliefs, intentions and biases • distinguish the importance of the writer’s voice, including the use of language, tone, syntax, coherence and awareness of audience • interpret multiple levels of meaning • connect the ideas in the text to real-life experiences and knowledge.

Writing Students should be encouraged to write as well as read widely — learning to write well and learning to read well go hand in hand. Just as reading books, magazines or newspapers in the family home can set a powerful example for reading, students can be taught to value writing in a variety of ways by the example of those around them. • Provide your child with a place to write, such as a designated desk or table in a quiet spot in the house. In addition to a computer, provide plenty of other materials, such as paper, pens and pencils. • Suggest that your child keeps a journal to write about ideas and feelings, aspirations, events that happen at home and school, interesting people and inventions of the imagination. Keep one yourself! If you and your child feel comfortable sharing some of this journalling, read the entries aloud and discuss them. How do accounts of shared experiences differ?

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• Encourage your child to write letters or emails to relatives and friends, or to find a penpal. Write a family newsletter together that you can send to overseas or interstate relatives. • Talk over ideas for writing projects or topics that interest your child. Steer her away from tasks that promote ‘knowledge telling’ or ‘knowledge dumping’. That is, if your child wants to write something about World War II, rather than choosing a topic like ‘The major events of World War II’, explore an issue that allows her to ‘apply’ her knowledge rather than just show it. A topic like ‘Should the United States of America have used nuclear strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki?’ requires the writer to have a solid understanding of the events of World War II, but also challenges her to engage with various historical perspectives and ethical considerations. Chapter 2 looked at a number of examples of writing responses and analysed some strengths and weaknesses against the framework of what examiners are looking for. Practising the kind of writing required in the scholarship test will give your child a better feel for the format, length and time restraints, and therefore hopefully give her more confidence in the test. However, developing writing skills is a long-term process that continues into adulthood. All of us can extend, improve and develop our writing skills through writing more. There are two main traditions of teaching writing: a skills approach with direct instruction of essential skills and grammar; and a process approach which is more student-centred and seeks to engage the interests of the student (Westwood, 2008). Teachers use both of these approaches to help children develop basic skills and knowledge and to extend and develop their ability to communicate well in a variety of contexts. With a skills approach, the teacher focuses on direct instruction about grammar, sentence construction, spelling and punctuation, essay writing formats and so on. The aim is to develop the ‘building block’ skills of writing. Process approaches, on the other hand, aim to extend and develop the student’s writing skills. Process approaches are often characterised by shared experiences of writing, in which the teacher engages the student in interesting and real-life writing experiences that make the process of writing explicit. Starting with thinking about the topic and purpose of writing, the teacher guides the student through a process of drafting and revising which allows the

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student to see that writing is an evolving process. Often teachers use collaborative writing approaches that maximise opportunities to transfer and share ideas between teachers and students and between students and other students.

Some process writing approaches Paired writing Two students (or a parent and child) work together to plan and write a story or report. Research has shown this to have a positive effect on developing writing skills. Writers’ workshop A group of writers choose a topic and then plan and write drafts over a number of sessions. Group sharing, paired writing and peer editing are important parts of the writers’ workshop. Guided writing Guided writing involves the teacher demonstrating the processes involved in a particular writing skill, for example, generating a topic, creating and organising an opening paragraph and developing the remaining ideas in logical sequence. Students then have an opportunity to try the skills themselves, perhaps presenting back to the group on how they went about it. (adapted from Westwood, 2008) One approach teachers use to make the writing process more explicit is to practise and use strategic writing approaches. These are strategies that help the writer plan and execute a writing task. Sometimes these strategies are expressed as acronyms or acrostics which the student learns to help them remember the steps of the strategy, for example, ‘POW and TREE’, or ‘POW and WWW and What 2 and How 2’. POW and TREE (for opinion essays) P = Pick your topic or idea. O = Organise your thoughts and make notes. W = Write, and then say more. T = Topic sentence — state your opinion. R = Give at least three reasons to support that belief.

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Developing skills and abilities E = Explain your reasons in more detail. E = End with a good concluding statement. (adapted from Harris et al., 2002) POW and WWW and What 2 and How 2 (for storytelling) P = Pick your topic or idea. O = Organise your thoughts and make notes. W = Write, and then say more. WWW = Who are the characters? When does the story take place? Where does the story take place? What 2 = What do the characters do? What happens? How 2 = How does the story end? How did the characters feel? (adapted from Saddler, 2006)

There are many books available on developing writing skills that focus on strategic approaches. The best strategic approaches are those that give the writer confidence and structure in approaching the task but are not prescriptive in exactly how the writing should be undertaken. Be sceptical of schematic approaches that try to teach the ‘perfect’ structure for an opinion essay or short story. These overly structured approaches may end up restricting and limiting the writer’s thinking rather than supporting her to explore interesting, wellformed and well-supported ideas. Simply stated, the key to becoming a confident and competent writer is to write. Doing lots of writing, as well as different kinds of writing, will help a student explore her written voice, apply her growing understanding of how best to communicate ideas in fluent and compelling ways and give her confidence to approach any writing task.

A note on spelling and punctuation When reading your child’s written compositions, provide as much constructive praise as possible. Focus first on the ideas the writer has conveyed, and the structure of how the ideas are organised. Fluency, spelling, punctuation and correct grammar are important insofar as they help a writer express ideas better. These are likely to improve the more often, and more widely, a student

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reads; although if a student consistently misunderstands rules of grammar, explicit revision may help. In general, it is more important for students to articulate interesting ideas, and to structure these into a fluent and compelling composition, than it is to worry about minor errors in spelling.

Mathematics The previous section discussed theories of thinking in order to clarify what it means to think critically. This section will discuss what it means to work mathematically. With regard to reading, for example, you have learnt the difference between rote learning, such as memorising a slab of text, and comprehension, such as understanding characters’ motivations by reading between the lines. In the same way, you may recognise that reciting times tables is not what maths is about in its entirety. What, then, does higher-order thinking look like in mathematics? The standard concept of higher-order thinking in maths currently used in school curricula is known as ‘working mathematically’, or sometimes thinking or reasoning mathematically. Working mathematically requires the practical and theoretical application of mathematical knowledge. Key to working mathematically is the skill of inquiry — real maths requires students to identify and pose problems, and to solve these by selecting and applying appropriate strategies. It entails skills in conjecture and proof, generalisation and estimation, and the use of mathematical models. Students also need to know how to express ideas and solutions using mathematical conventions. According to the National Mathematics Forum (2008) in the Initial Advice paper to the National Curriculum Board (now known as the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority – ACARA), working mathematically is about ‘interpreting the world mathematically, appreciating the elegance and power of mathematical thinking, experiencing mathematics as an enjoyable experience, and using mathematics to inform predictions and decisions about personal and financial priorities’ (p. 5). The National Mathematics Forum (2008) lists what it considers to be the key capacities that allow mathematically literate people to interpret everyday information: number sense; measurement, such as length, mass and capacity;

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estimating quantities; aspects of location including map reading; properties of shapes; personal finance and budgeting; graphical interpretation; understanding ratio, rates and percentages; using and manipulating formulas; identifying patterns

and

relationships;

modelling;

graphical

interpretation;

and

representing and interpreting sophisticated data. The current Australian Curriculum: Mathematics has incorporated all of these ideas into its rationale and ‘aims to ensure that students are confident, creative users and communicators of mathematics, able to investigate, represent and interpret situations in their personal and work lives and as active citizens’ (ACARA, 2012). You can support this at home by becoming aware yourself of all the many ways that you use maths in everyday life, and using your life experiences as learning opportunities for your child.

Working mathematically in the real world Cooking, shopping, travelling and sport are all great everyday opportunities for a student to engage in exploring mathematical thinking. Students can practise by: • converting a recipe that serves four to serve 12 or 15 • working out the best value product among a number of different brands and sizes at the supermarket • doing some research on the best mobile phone plan for different family members • finding the next place on the map where they’ll need to fill up petrol on a road trip • calculating the run rate required in a cricket match, or how many points per quarter a team will need to score to win a game of basketball from a losing position.

The point about making maths relevant to real life is an important one. Some students, and some parents, say they find maths hard, boring and inaccessible. This is probably because they struggle to get past the traditional concept of maths as monotonous times tables, rows of sums and formulae. These mathematical tools have their place, and a student must acquire basic numeracy and mathematical knowledge that she can then apply to work mathematically. However, there will almost always be a way to make these tasks more interesting by contextualising them with relevant, real-life examples.

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If your child mutters the dreaded question, ‘When am I ever going to use this in real life?’, you should have an answer ready! Perhaps the most pragmatic reason to take maths seriously is that it is required in many other subjects, such as business studies, psychology, geography, chemistry, physics, and information and communication technology. It is essential for anyone planning to go into professional occupations such as economics, architecture or engineering, or into trades such as building, sports, health and hospitality. When solving mathematical problems, a student’s thinking may progress through three stages: identifying and describing; understanding and applying; and communicating and justifying (Queensland Studies Authority, 2005). In the first phase, identifying and describing, a student might explain her understanding of the problem in her own words. Try prompting your child to identify the problem, what information she has, what information she needs to find out, whether she has done a problem like this before, what mathematical tools and concepts she already has that she could apply to this problem and what steps she might take to progress. In the second phase, understanding and applying, the student can apply the strategies she has identified, such as applying concepts and tools to tackle the problem; looking for patterns; representing the problem using graphs, objects, pictures, symbols or models; generating a solution; and testing and verifying her solution by real-world trialling, using a different method to achieve the same outcome, or working backwards from the answer to prove her work. Encourage your child to discuss the reasoning, methods and outcomes of her work, including both correct and incorrect outcomes. Students should try to develop a habit of checking their solutions against a real-life scenario. If a student’s solution to a distance and speed problem in the real-life context of long-distance running has an athlete breaking the sound barrier on foot, for example, it suggests she may need to rework the problem. Parents should allow their child, as often as possible, to reach these conclusions on her own, and to generate her own self-correcting alternative solutions. The third phase, communicating and justifying, occurs after a student has generated what she believes to be the solution to the problem. Again, she should be able to explain her own work, the steps she took, the tools she applied, the

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proof of the solution and what she has learnt from the problem. Challenge any missing information, jumps or inconsistencies in logic. The idea is for her to generalise her learning and make connections between existing and new knowledge, so that she retains skills to be applied to future problem-solving opportunities.

School education for gifted and talented students The recent Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Education of Gifted and Talented Students found that the key to educating gifted students is to personalise learning for each student. Key strategies in schools should include: • an individual learning plan for each student — maintaining a document that summarises a student’s strengths and areas for improvement; sets learning goals to extend these strengths and address these relative weaknesses; and outlines strategies through which these goals will be achieved • curriculum differentiation — tailoring the curriculum, teaching methods and learning activities to meet each student’s learning needs and goals • acceleration — supporting high-achieving students to move through the curriculum more quickly than other students • ability grouping — assigning students to classes or study groups based on achievement rather than age • extension and enrichment — extracurricular academic activities, such as the Tournament of Minds, science projects, chess club, music lessons, excursions, and so on. (Parliament of Victoria, Education and Training Committee, 2012, pp. 109–120)

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Case study: Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Sydney, New South Wales Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC Sydney) in Croydon, Sydney, is an independent day and boarding school for girls from Reception to Year 12 (R–12), offering a broad curriculum, including a strong music program, to approximately 1300 students from a diverse range of backgrounds. New students, as well as current PLC Sydney students, sit the ACER scholarship test in Year 6 for entry into Year 7. Mr Rod Broadhead, Head Teacher, Curriculum R–12, explains that while candidates can indicate alternative preferences when they register to sit the test, the College looks most favourably on candidates who indicate PLC Sydney as their first preference. ‘We’re looking to identify candidates for whom PLC Sydney is the first preference. We value candidates and their families who want to become a part of the College community,’ Mr Broadhead says. ‘We expect candidates to sit the ACER Cooperative Scholarship Testing Program (CSTP) test at our school if PLC Sydney is their first preference.’ ACER produces the CSTP tests, supplies the test to schools, marks the test papers and reports the results to schools, but not directly to candidates. ‘We use results from the ACER CSTP suite of written expression, comprehension and interpretation, and mathematics tests to identify the general capabilities of candidates. Students who gain an academic scholarship place at PLC Sydney will typically have performed well across the CSTP tests. While we don’t weight results from particular tests, we may use results from the language components as a way to discriminate in cases where two candidates are in all other respects equal.’ ‘We arrive at a shortlist on the basis of the ACER CSTP results, alongside each candidate’s portfolio, which includes school reports, but we give significant weight to the ACER CSTP results since these provide us with a common measure for all candidates.’

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The College also uses the portfolios, which demonstrate each candidate’s involvement in extracurricular activities and community service, and achievement in sports, music or arts programs, to identify candidates’ potential to lead by positive example. ‘The most useful portfolios provide information in an economical way, outlining highlights that demonstrate the achievements of the candidate, and provide evidence of her well-roundedness and contributions to her current school.’ All shortlisted candidates are invited to an interview, at which they are typically offered a full or partial scholarship. ‘The purpose,’ explains Mr Broadhead, ‘is to learn a little more about the candidate and her family, to confirm her fit with the College and in some cases ascertain instances where there is a particular financial need.’ Candidates for scholarships to PLC can register online, with registrations typically opening late in third term and closing the following February. Candidates sit the ACER CSTP test in February for consideration for a scholarship the following year. ‘PLC attracts candidates of a very high calibre from a very wide range of locations,’ Mr Broadhead says. ‘Parents need to understand that it is a very competitive field.’ The impact of scholarship students at PLC Sydney is significant, Mr Broadhead explains. ‘PLC Sydney is well known as a school that pursues excellence in every sphere, and our academic scholarships program clearly supports that pursuit. We’re not simply looking for academic excellence, though; we’re also looking for high-achieving girls who will participate in and enrich the school.’ ‘We have a very cohesive cohort of girls and our scholarship students play an important role in enhancing our learning environment. We all know that high-quality teachers play a crucial role in maintaining a culture of excellence in our College, but the positive peer effect of students on one another is also immensely important to us.’

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Chapter 4 Preparing for the day

Many students preparing to sit a scholarship or selection test find the week leading up to the test can be a very stressful time. As this book has emphasised, the most important thing for a parent to do is to make sure that their child feels supported.

The week before the test If you have followed the advice contained within this book, preparing your child to sit for a scholarship or selection test has been a long-term process of engaging in her education and developing her higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills. A balanced approach is as important as ever in the days before the test. Now is not the time to resort to cramming or rote learning. This is very unlikely to help a student perform better in a scholarship or selection test. Your long-term efforts up to this point have contributed to your child’s preparation for the test. She is either ready or she is not, and undue pressure will not help her in either case. Help her to relax and feel valued. She may be feeling quite anxious about the test and the implications of her results, so try to remove any additional stressors from her life at this time. Support her emotionally. Remember, most students who sit a scholarship or selection test do not receive a place, so prepare her, and yourself, for this possibility. Reassure her that it is OK if she doesn’t get a place. This is not a test of her worth as a person, nor does her entire future depend on the results.

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Dealing with panic Many students find the test stressful. Good long-term preparation is the best way to prevent anxiety, but even well-prepared students can experience nerves. The first strategy to deal with panic is to stop working. Taking a break when panic sets in is time invested, not wasted. It is much better than letting the panic continue, as a student is unlikely to work effectively until the panic has gone. If a student feels panicky during the test, she should put her pencil down, cover the question sheet so she can’t see it and clasp her hands loosely together. She should drop her shoulders, uncross her legs and let her body relax and go limp. Then, breathing slowly and deeply through her nose, she should think only about the rhythm of her breath, in and out. She should take as long as she needs to feel her mind calm down. If her confidence is waning, she could try visualising a space in the house — her room or desk perhaps — where she has undertaken successful learning. Reflecting on the preparation you have done together may remind her that she is, in fact, primed to attempt this test. Hopefully, too, if you have been supportive without undue pressure, thinking about the preparation you have done together will be associated with feelings of confidence and joy in learning, and this may buoy her on test day. When she feels ready to return to the test, she should begin by looking not at the next question, but at one which she has finished, to review her successful work and build confidence before moving on. If it’s right at the start of the test and she has not yet completed a question, she should look through the questions and start with an ‘easy’ one, or one she feels confident with.

This is not the time for intensive study, but you can prepare in other practical ways. If you do not know how to get to the test centre, try going there at a similar time a week before the real test to ensure you know what to expect from traffic and parking, and to ensure you will not be late on the day. A student will usually sit the test at the school for which she is applying for the scholarship or select-entry program. In the case of cooperative tests, if she has applied for places at more than one school, she will usually sit the test at her first-preference school. If you are distant from the school, most testing programs will be able to offer you alternative arrangements. If your child is

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not currently attending the school to which she is applying for a scholarship or select-entry place, it may be worthwhile to arrange for her to tour the school before the test day. A large private school, filled with alien buildings and — on test day — a crowd of unknown people, may be an unfamiliar environment for your child, and could be an overwhelming or intimidating experience. It may allay her nerves on test day if she is at least a little familiar with the test centre. The days leading up to the test should be a time to slow down. Spend time on activities unrelated to study. Students should exercise, eat healthily and get plenty of good sleep in the week leading up to, and particularly the night before, the test. It may be worthwhile to learn some relaxation or breathing exercises, and to set in place a strategy your child can use if she feels overwhelmed or panicky on test day, such as the strategies outlined previously in this chapter. The day before the test, the student should ensure she has everything she needs ready and packed. This will include two HB or B pencils, a good quality pencil eraser and two blue or black pens. There will be short breaks between sections of the test so you may like to bring something to eat or drink during the breaks. The student may also need to bring some form of identification in order to complete the test registration form. Check with the test organisers or school about what may be brought to the test. Rulers, mathematical instruments of any kind, programmable watches, mobile phones, cameras or other image/data capturing devices, books or notepaper are often not allowed in the test centre.

The day of the test On the morning of the test, encourage your child to eat a substantial healthy breakfast. She will have several hours of concentration ahead of her and this will require a lot of energy. Give yourself plenty of time to get to the test centre. Aim to be at the test centre at least 15 minutes prior to the start of the test. This is usually at 8.45 am but check with the school before the test day. Each student may be required to ­complete a registration form before entering the test centre, so it is important to

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arrive at the time specified by the school even if the test is not due to start until later. Latecomers may not be admitted to the test centre. This is at the discretion of the examination supervisor. Latecomers, if admitted, will not receive any additional time to complete the test. Students may be anxious on the way to the school and as they wait to go into the test centre. A certain amount of anxiety is quite normal. Getting nervous is a physical response and the effects include increased alertness and focus, which will be beneficial in the test. Very high levels of anxiety, on the other hand, may overload the nervous system. It’s a fine line between good and bad stress, and your safest course of action is to not add to the pressure. Remind your child that everyone else is feeling the same way, and reassure her that you are confident she will do her best. If she doesn’t want to talk about the test, respect that. She may need a few moments of quiet to clear her head and prepare mentally.

During the test Once seated for the test, the student should try to relax, give herself time to answer the questions fully and clarify with the supervisor if she is unsure about any of the test day procedures. The test centre should be comfortable for testing, with appropriate lighting, ventilation, temperature and noise level. All students should be in a position to hear the supervisor and see a clock. If the student is uncomfortable in any way, she can ask the supervisor to try to fix the situation. Your child should pay close attention immediately before the test begins, when the supervisor addresses the students and runs over test instructions, such as showing the students where to record the answers to each test. She should read the instructions on the front cover of each test carefully. It is important for your child to focus on what she knows, not what she doesn’t. Remember, many scholarship and selection tests do not require students to repeat memorised facts and figures; rather, it is looking for the student’s ability to apply given information and concepts in new situations. With well-developed problem-solving skills, she should be able to tackle any

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question the test has, even if she has never seen that particular question before. It is also imperative that the student manages her time well during the test. Before the test she should be aware of the tasks she will be expected to complete within a given time frame. She should have thought about how long she aims to spend on planning, drafting or on each question. For the written expression section, practice should have provided the student with a guide to how long she should spend brainstorming her ideas, drafting and writing each piece. In the humanities section, she may have, for example, 40 minutes to complete 40 multiple-choice questions. Therefore, she should plan to spend a little less than a minute on each question, leaving a few minutes at the end to review her answers. The mathematics section might allow 40 minutes for 32 questions; so the student should plan to spend about a minute on each. Many people start from the beginning and work through each question in order, while others prefer to work on the easiest questions first. The student should take care when filling in the separate answer sheet to mark all of her answers against the correct question number, particularly if she is completing the questions out of order. Every question is of equal value, so it is unwise to spend too much time on any question the student might find particularly troublesome. Remember, though, that no marks are deducted for wrong answers, so it is also best not to leave any answers blank. If the student finds herself stuck on one question, she may want to make an informed guess, mark this on the answer sheet and make a note to return to this question if there is time later. She should remember to crosscheck that she is marking her answers against the correct question number. The questions in each section of a scholarship or selection test fall roughly into units or subsections, but these may not be flagged in the test question booklet. Questions within each unit become increasingly more difficult, but as the test moves to the next unit, the questions will begin again at the lowest level of difficulty. A saw-tooth pattern, as seen on the following page, is a good way to think of the difficulty level of the questions throughout the test.

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Preparing for the day

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There may be 32 questions in a mathematics section, for example. The first five questions may, for example, be related to a geometric figure, where Question 1 is the easiest and Question 5 the hardest. The next five questions might be data and probability problems, where Question 6 is the easiest and Question 10 the hardest. In this way, Question 6 may be easier than Question 5 or even Question 3. This is not signposted within the test, and a student taking the test may not be aware of it at all, but the important thing for her to know is that even if she is stuck on one question that seems particularly difficult, she should not give up on the rest of the test. If she is stuck on one question, it may very well be the most difficult question for a topic, and the next question will be the easiest question for a new topic. She should remain calm and move on, as she may find the next question quite easy. A student should try to allow some time at the end of the test to review and check over her answers. If time is nearly up and there are questions she has not answered, it is worth taking a guess. She should make sure that her answers are clear and easy to read, and are all in the correct place.

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At the end of each section of the test, no-one will be allowed to leave the test centre until all the answer sheets have been collected. There will be a short break between each section of the test, in which each student should stretch her legs, perhaps have something to eat or drink and try to clear her head. Remember, each section of the test is marked independently, so she should try not to let any concern about her performance in one section influence her approach to the next section. Each section is another chance to put all the preparation into practice.

Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) For most scholarship and selection tests, a special answer sheet is provided for the multiple-choice sections. For each question, there are four small ovals labelled A, B, C and D. The student will need to record the answer to each question by marking the oval of her choice with an HB or B pencil. When the test is marked, a computer scans the answer sheets, using optical mark recognition (OMR) technology. Because the answer sheet is initially scanned by a machine, there is no room for interpretation of what each student might have meant to answer on any given question. The student must make sure that she marks her answer in the oval against the question she is answering. Marking one answer next to the wrong question number will not just make that answer incorrect, but will throw out the rest of the answers. This will be time consuming for a student to fix if she realises too late that she has marked the answer sheet wrongly. It is much easier to crosscheck frequently that each answer is marked against the correct question number. It is also important that the student: • uses only an HB or B pencil • does not use ink, ballpoint pen, felt pen or fine-leaded propelling pencil on any part of the answer sheet • does not make any marks on the answer sheet other than in the designated areas • rubs out any mistakes she makes • does not fold or tear the answer sheet. If a student wants to change an answer, she must erase the pencil mark completely and fill in the oval corresponding to her new answer.

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After the test After the test is over, be prepared for your child to experience a range of mixed feelings about how she thinks she performed. No doubt she will be relieved, and in the luckiest of cases she may even be confident — but it is also quite normal for students to feel that they could have done better, or to agonise over imagined mistakes. Don’t assume the worst — your child’s nerves are not representative of her actual performance. Almost every student leaving the test centre will be feeling the same way, and for this reason it is best if you cut short any discussion among students of who answered what for which question. Your child will almost certainly have answered some questions differently from other students, and even though her answers may be correct, if she is already disheartened, this sort of speculation isn’t going to allay her fears. Similarly, immediately after the test is not the best time for you to undertake a debriefing session. Give your child some breathing room, and wait until the experience is a little less raw before attempting a post-mortem of the test.

Case Study: Trinity Anglican School, White Rock, Queensland Trinity Anglican School in far north Queensland is an independent coeducational school catering to around 1200 students from Prep to Year 12. The school comprises a junior school for Prep to Year 7 at White Rock, a suburb of Cairns; another junior school for Prep to Year 7 at a campus at Kewarra Beach, on the Marlin Coast; and a senior school for Years 8 to 12 at White Rock. Trinity Anglican School Principal Mr Christopher Daunt Watney says the school enjoys high academic standards within a disciplined learning environment through a program that caters for the widest range of student abilities and talents so that staff can focus on each individual. Trinity Anglican School runs the Cooperative Scholarship Testing Program at Levels 1, 2 and 3 for students seeking scholarships for entry

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to Years 8, 9 and 11. Students are awarded scholarships to cover part or all of their school fees for the rest of their education at the school. Principal of Trinity Anglican School, Mr Christopher Daunt Watney, says he awards scholarships purely on the basis of the scholarship test scores. He says that this is one of the key benefits of using an externally administered and validated test. ‘The scholarship test is an objective measure that has, for a number of years, provided schools with a very good benchmark in terms of where individual scholarship candidates rank against a large number of other students. The benefit to me as a principal is that it is a really good objective test,’ he says. It is also a challenging test for candidates, he says, and this places a responsibility on parents to understand the results of the test. ‘It is important that parents recognise that the scholarship test measures their child against some of the brightest students in the country. It is a competitive test,’ says Mr Daunt Watney. Preparation is key to your student performing well under this pressure, he advises. ‘If students are reasonably familiar with the way in which the testing is conducted and the type of questions that come up within the test, I think they are going to perform better. Parents preparing their children should have a look at sample questions, look at the sort of writing tasks and questions that the children will need to complete, and be aware of the time constraints of the test,’ he suggests. The number and mix of scholarships varies from year to year, as Mr Daunt Watney explains. ‘Depending on the scores, I might offer several scholarships varying in value from 25 per cent to 50 per cent of tuition fees, so that I can make what funds I have available for scholarships go further. The maximum available scholarship constitutes a 75 per cent remission on tuition fees.’

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Managing expectations It may be helpful for students and parents to review the expectations and goals you each have about the scholarship or selection test throughout the process of preparing for the test, on the day of the test itself, in the time following the test as you await the results and after the results arrive. This book has focused on developing a student’s skills and abilities. Rather than the attainment of a scholarship or select-entry place as the goal, the emphasis has been placed on the process, and on making that process as useful to the student as you can. Parents will naturally have high hopes that their child will receive a scholarship or select-entry place. Some students do, and your child may be one of these. The reality is, however, that most students who sit a scholarship or selection test will not receive a scholarship or select-entry place. The disappointment of not being awarded a place can be demoralising, especially as your child is likely to be used to excelling and receiving high marks at school. It is important to keep in mind that these tests are designed to be challenging for high-achieving students, and although your child may not receive a place, this does not mean she has performed poorly. In any group of students sitting a scholarship or selection test, the overwhelming majority will be students who achieve in the top 20 per cent of the students nationwide, so logic suggests that even if your child scores at the lowest end of this range, she may still be achieving at a high level comparative to the general population for her age group.

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It is also important to remember that individual schools have their own criteria for awarding places, and these may not be based entirely on the results of scholarship or selection tests. Your child may perform very well in the test overall, but not be awarded a scholarship if the school of your choice is looking particularly for strong mathematics students with demonstrated leadership qualities, for example, or only awards scholarships to students in financial need. Regardless of whether a student receives a place or not, she can review the results of the test to evaluate her strengths and areas for improvement. Use the results in a positive way to compare which sections of the test your child did best on, and areas in which her performance was not as strong as you might have predicted. This might indicate areas in which she should focus her study efforts in future. The first chapter of this book posed some questions to help you clarify your motivations for registering your child to sit a scholarship or selection test. One in particular is relevant following the test. Ask yourself, ‘Have I made the process of preparing for and sitting the test a positive experience for my child regardless of the outcome?’ In assisting your child to prepare for the test, you have hopefully seen her develop problem-solving and creative thinking skills that will be useful as she progresses through school, and as she embarks upon life beyond the school gates. With any luck, both you and your child have enjoyed the time spent learning together, and this valuable bonding experience will better enable you to provide your child with the emotional support she may need when she receives her test results.

Understanding the meaning of results Some weeks after a student sits the scholarship or selection test, she will receive her results from the school of her choice. The testing organisation reports students’ results to the relevant schools, generally within one month of the test date. The testing organisation may not report results directly to students. The key to understanding the test results is a very important point that has been emphasised throughout this book, but which is worth reiterating.

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Your child’s performance on a scholarship or selection test is being marked relative to that of the best students from around the state, interstate and sometimes even from overseas. The other students are sitting the test because they believe they are talented enough to have a chance of winning a scholarship or select-entry place. It is a self-selective group of very highachieving students. To assist you in understanding the meaning of the results, this section will explain the marking and analysis process that may be undertaken by a testing organisation. This information is specific to the ACER Scholarship Tests developed and administered by the Australian Council for Education Research.

Marking Marking of multiple-choice answer sheets For mathematics, science and humanities sections that consist of multiplechoice questions, each student will have marked her answers on a special answer sheet designed to be scanned by a computer using optical mark recognition (OMR) software. These answer sheets are marked by computer.

Marking of written responses The aim of marking scholarship and selection test responses is to find and exaggerate differences in achievement. Remember that the markers’ task is to provide information to schools about who the best students are. Not all students can be awarded high marks. Your child may be the best writer in her class at her school. If she doesn’t score well on the written expression of the scholarship or selection test, it doesn’t necessarily mean her classroom teacher is wrong, or that she is a poor writer. It may simply mean that she was not the best writer, on the test day, out of a group of other very good writers. The judging of any form of written response is by its nature somewhat subjective. Markers use their experience and judgement to decide between students. Bear in mind, however, that often several highly-qualified markers will read and reach consensus on each student’s work. Markers don’t start with one perfect answer in their heads which they hope to find on the page in front of them. Very often in a writing test, they will give

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full marks to two pieces of writing that offer quite different approaches to the same topic. Review Chapter 2 of this book, ‘About the tests’, for more detail on what the markers are looking for in a written expression paper.

How written responses are marked All answer sheets and papers are marked anonymously. Markers do not know whose test paper they are marking. The different sections of the tests are marked in different ways. The written expression papers are assessed by a team of 40 or so experienced markers. All markers have teaching experience. The team of markers is specifically trained in how to mark scholarship test papers by expert lead markers and test developers. Each paper is blind-marked by two markers. Tests at some levels will have required each student to have completed two writing tasks; those two pieces are separated and marked completely independently. Two markers will assess each student’s first written paper and two different markers will assess that same student’s second paper. If there is a discrepancy of more than one mark between the first and second marking of a given writing piece, it then goes to discrepancy marking for a third assessment by one of the lead markers. Frequent crosschecking of marking maintains consistency between markers and ensures an even distribution of results.

Reported scores Standardised scores as well as scale scores (for more recent tests in humanities and in mathematics and science only) are used in the reporting of results. Raw scores are the number of questions a student answered correctly in each section of the test. Raw scores are converted to standardised scores to enable above and below average performance to be easily identified in relation to the performance of the whole group of students who sat each test. Standardised scores are generated for each test and also for the student’s total performance on the test. Scale scores in the humanities test and in the mathematics and science test have been added to the reporting of some of the more recent tests. These scale scores allow for direct comparisons to be made across levels and across different tests, within each subject.

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Comparison groups Each student’s results show her performance against other students who have sat the scholarship or selection test. In the case of cooperative testing programs, where all participating schools hold the test on the same day, the candidature can include thousands of students. For these tests, your child’s results are marked comparative to the Australia-wide group of all other students who sat the test at that level on that day. In the case of alternate date testing programs, for which participating schools independently choose a testing date to suit their schedules, the candidature for a test can be quite small. For these tests, your child’s performance is measured against a comparison group from a previous administration. For the ACER Scholarship Tests, this is an Australia-wide cohort of students who originally sat this test.

Percentiles You may receive some indication from the results or the school that your child has performed in the 95th percentile, for example, or the 75th, or the 50th percentile of students. What does this mean? It is easy to confuse percentile with per cent, but the two terms are not interchangeable. As Jan and Stephen Chappuis (2002) explain in their book Understanding School Assessment: A parent and community guide to helping students learn, per cent, in this case, could be related to raw scores regardless of other students’ performance, while percentile is always a form of ranking scores and comparing students against each other: Per cent correct refers to the percentage of questions the student answered correctly and percentile to the percentage of the norm group that the student outscored. A student who receives a percentile score of 50 on a standardised test did not get half the items right. That would be a per cent correct score … Instead, it means she outscored 50 per cent of the students who took the test during what is called the norming process. (p. 98) The percentile rank is the point below which a certain proportion of the students’ scores fall. The 20th percentile, for example, is the score below which

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20 per cent of the students scored. If a student answered 24 questions correctly out of the 32 questions in the mathematics and science test, for example, then she scored 75 per cent correct. But, if half the students got more than 24 correct and the other half got fewer than 24 correct, she will be in the 50th percentile. So, if you are told that your child is in, for example, the 99th percentile, that means she has performed better than 99 per cent of the other students. Vice versa, this also implies she is in the top 1 per cent of students.

Analysis and reporting After all students’ tests responses have been through the marking, scoring and reporting processes, schools will receive results from ACER. The standardised score represents how your child performed overall in relation to all other students sitting the test. The reporting of results to each student will indicate how that student performed relative to the Australia-wide cohort who sat the same set of tests, both overall and in each test, in terms of percentile ranks. In some cases, your child’s overall performance may be considerably higher or lower than her performance on an individual test. As an example, a student might have performed very well in the written expression section but slightly below average rank on the mathematics and science section. She might receive an overall rank just above average, because the high written expression score has pulled the overall rank up. A student who performs just below an average level on all sections of the test may rank very low in the overall performance, because most students have strengths and weaknesses, and relatively few achieve low scores on all sections. A student who receives a scholarship or select-entry place based on her test scores may not have achieved the top score in all sections of the test. She may, for example, have scored well in humanities, well in maths and science, and about average in written expression. Overall, these section scores may ensure she is ranked at the top of the overall merit order, because she has done better overall compared to, say, a student who achieved consistently a bit above average for all sections of the test. This information may be helpful as you prepare for the test. If you know your child excels at reading and writing but is not as strong in maths, for

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example, it may be worth concentrating on her maths skills just enough that her overall score is not dragged down by a low score in the mathematics section. As mentioned earlier in this book, it is also worth contacting your firstpreference school before the test, to find out what qualities and strengths the school is looking for in its scholarship and select-entry students. This may allow you to consider whether your child is suited to that school, or to focus preparation on ensuring your child meets the requirements of that school.

Requests for information In very rare cases, some parents wish to appeal the results of their child’s scholarship or selection test. If you think there is something wrong with your child’s results, there is a procedure you can follow. First, you should contact the testing organisation. There may be an identifiable reason that a student has not performed as well as expected. If a student has scored low on one of the multiple-choice tests, for example, it may be that the form was not filled in because the student marked her answers in the question booklet. While this cannot always be remedied, it can be checked, and so you will better understand your child’s results. General queries may be able to be answered over the phone or via email; however, if your query requires the testing organisation to access your child’s test papers and answer sheets, you will need to submit a formal request for this information. (Note that documentation is unlikely to be held for any great length of time after the marking period. If you have a query more than several months after receiving test results, it may not be possible to retrieve test papers and answer sheets.) If the testing organisation advises that you need to submit a formal request for information, the organisation may direct you to download a personal information request form. The testing organisation should then retrieve the student’s test papers and answer sheets from secure storage. In some cases, written responses may be rechecked or multiple-choice answer sheets may be hand-scored by expert markers. This process may take several weeks. In addition, an administrative fee is likely to be payable for this service.

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When this process is complete, you will receive copies of the written expression papers and of the multiple-choice answer sheets, and reissued a student report. You will not receive copies of test booklets or questions, as this information is commercial in-confidence. Scholarship and selection tests are secure instruments, and any public viewing of test questions would compromise further administration of the tests. Testing organisations will not disclose the merit listing of students. Parents may have a strong desire to know where their child was ranked in relation to other students, but testing organisations will not disclose any information that could be construed as an invasion of any student’s privacy.

Comparison with national tests You may want to know how your child’s results on the scholarship or selection test compare with her results on other testing programs, such as the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). It is impossible to compare these sets of results. Scholarship and selection tests assess different skills than national tests such as NAPLAN, so comparing your child’s scores from each will not tell you anything meaningful. The results of scholarship and selection tests are also reported differently to the results of national tests such as NAPLAN. NAPLAN results show how students have performed compared to a set of established standards; for example, when reading a text, whether the student can locate specific information, connect ideas, recognise the motivations of characters and so on. Scholarship and selection tests only show how students have performed compared to the other students sitting the test. Scholarship and selection tests also assess a different set of students than national tests such as NAPLAN. Remember that standardised scores show a student’s performance relative to the performance of the other students who sat the test. The candidatures for the scholarship and selection tests and for the national tests are not the same, so the scores cannot be compared. Standardised scores for scholarship and selection tests apply to a special student population of above average ability, while national testing results apply to the general population of students. You may find that your child got very good results in national testing programs, but has been ranked quite low on a scholarship or selection test. Remember that even if a student scores at the lowest end of the scholarship or selection test candidature range,

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Now what? she may still be achieving at a high level comparative to the general population for her age group. Parents sometimes express concern that a low score on a scholarship or selection test means that their child needs tutoring or remedial help. Some parents even worry that a low score means their child has a learning disability. This is unlikely to be the case. If your child is performing well in school, has scored well in national testing and is enjoying learning at home with you, it is more likely that she simply found the scholarship or selection test challenging because these tests are designed to be challenging, even for high-achieving students. These are difficult tests; therefore, to achieve at any level in these tests indicates a good standard of achievement in the areas assessed.

Case study: St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School, Gippsland, Victoria St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School, in the Gippsland region of Victoria’s south-east, is an independent coeducational school catering to approximately 1600 students from Prep to Year 12. The school comprises an Early Learning Centre to Year 10 campus in Traralgon; an Early Learning Centre to Year 12 campus in Warragul; and a Year 9 Centre on a separate site in Warragul. The school offers academic and general excellence scholarships for students in Years 5 to 11. Approximately 50 students sit the scholarship tests each year for about five scholarship places across the school. St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School’s Head of Admissions, Mrs Amanda Bibby, explains that the school looks at the overall results of students’ performance on the scholarship test. ‘The academic scholarships are awarded based on student results in the scholarship test and interviews with students. The general excellence scholarships are based on the test results and students applications, which include details about students’ involvement in community

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Scholarship and Selection tests

service, performing arts and sport, as well as copies of their school reports,’ Mrs Bibby says. ‘We generally don’t look particularly for students strong in any given area; we don’t prioritise maths over literacy or vice versa. We aim to identify well-rounded students with very strong academic performance,’ she says. St Paul’s Anglican Grammar School offers partial scholarships to cover varying amounts of students’ costs to study at the school from entry through to the end of Year 12. ‘One of the most common questions we get from parents concerning the scholarships is about what level of remission off the school fees we award to scholarship recipients. That’s a really difficult question for us to answer until we’ve seen the students’ test results and applications. We really don’t offer full scholarships, because we like the parents to contribute as well,’ Mrs Bibby says. ‘Parents also ask for advice about how they can help their children to practise for the scholarship test. We advise them to make the most of the practice materials available from the testing organisation,’ she says. Ultimately, Mrs Bibby says, the best advice the school can offer students and parents about the scholarship test is to manage their expectations. Parents should keep in mind that scholarship tests are designed to be difficult for high-achieving students, but that, regardless of the outcome of the test, the process of preparing for the test can be a positive learning experience for their child. ‘We offer scholarships to maybe one in ten of the students who sit the scholarship test. And yet, some parents do get quite upset when their child doesn’t get a scholarship. Parents need to be aware that the scholarship process is very competitive, and prepare for the possibility that their child may not be successful, even though their child may be an excellent student,’ Mrs Bibby says.

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Appendix 1: Description of specific scholarship tests ACER scholarship tests The ACER Scholarship Tests consist of a series of academic ability tests used to select students for the award of a scholarship. Independent schools around Australia choose a testing date which best suits their school needs. Schools can choose to take part in a cooperative program where schools share results, or to hold the test on a date of their choice where candidates must sit at the school on that date. The ACER Scholarship Tests are used by approximately 250 independent schools across Australia to identify academically able students for the award of a scholarship. The tests are designed to rank order students, finely discriminating at the top end of performance. The tests require students to demonstrate a range of skills such as the ability to interpret, infer, deduce and think critically. They are not curriculum based and do not test the ability to retrieve learned knowledge.

Levels of examination The levels of examination are shown in the table below: STATE

PRIMARY

LEVEL 1

LEVEL 2

LEVEL 3

Current

Current

Current

Current

Year 3/4/5

Year 6/7

Year 8/9

Year 10/11

Current

Current

Current

Current

Year 4/5/6

Year 7/8

Year 9

Year 10/11

ACT NSW NT TAS VIC SA WA QLD

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Appendix 1

Test structure Primary level The test available at the primary level has been developed by ACER for use by those schools that wish to offer scholarships at upper primary levels. The test can also be administered as part of entry placement procedures or as a scholarship test at any time convenient to the school wishing to use it. The test has three sections: two in multiple-choice format and one in written expression format. The program consists of two short writing tasks; a humanities section of 25 multiple-choice questions; and a mathematics section of 20 multiple-choice questions involving addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. This test usually takes students about 2.5 hours to complete, including administration and breaks.

Primary

Section 1 30 minutes

Section 2 30 minutes

Section 3 40 minutes

Reading and Viewing (25 multiple-choice questions)

Mathematics (20 multiple-choice questions)

Writing (two short pieces)

Secondary level The test at the secondary level has four sections: two in written expression format and two in multiple-choice format. This test runs for approximately three hours, including administration and breaks.

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

Section 1 25 minutes

Section 2 40 minutes

Section 3 40 minutes

Section 4 25 minutes

Written Expression

Humanities: Comprehension and Interpretation

Mathematics

Written Expression

(one piece)

(40 multiple-choice questions)

(32 multiple-choice questions)

Written Expression

Humanities: Comprehension and Interpretation

Science/ Mathematics

Written Expression

(one piece)

(40 multiple-choice questions)

(32 multiple-choice questions)

(one piece)

Written Expression

Humanities: Comprehension and Interpretation

Science/ Mathematics

Written Expression

(one piece)

(40 multiple-choice questions)

(32 multiple-choice questions)

(one piece)

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(one piece)

Appendix 1

Cooperative programs The cooperative programs involve a large number of schools testing on the same test date. Candidates may register for several schools, sit the test once and have their results reported to all schools to which they have applied within the cooperative program. Where candidates register for more than one school they are required to list, in order of preference, all schools to which they have applied. Schools may make offers to any student regardless of the preference order specified by the candidate. Parents will be advised to carefully select the preference order as some schools will only consider students that have listed their school as the first preference. The Australian Cooperative Entry Program is used in South Australia for students in their final year of primary school for entry into first year of secondary school. The test has four sections: two in written expression format and two in multiple-choice format. This test runs for approximately three hours, including administration and breaks.

Alternate date programs Schools that don’t elect to be part of a cooperative program may wish to select their own testing date. If an alternate date is chosen, candidates will be advised to attend the school and sit the test on a nominated date.

Further information and resources Further information about participating schools and test dates can be found at . To purchase practice test materials or any other resources, shop online at or visit the ACER Bookshop at . Practice test materials for purchase include: • Sample Collection of Questions, Volume 2 (ACER, 2004) • ACER Scholarship Sample Test (2012) • Online Practice Tests (ACER, 2012)

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Appendix 2: Description of specific selection tests, select-entry schools and programs Selection tests Higher Ability Selection Test (HAST) HAST is an ability test used by secondary schools to identify academically gifted students for participation in accelerated learning and enhancement programs. The program delivers rigorous tests in reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning, abstract reasoning and written expression at all levels of secondary school including first-level entry. HAST is designed to measure innate ability and academic potential unlike curriculum based tests that typically identify what a student has already learned. For more information see .

Higher Ability Selection Test – primary (HAST-P) The HAST-P helps with assessment and placement at the middle primary level by determining which students are working at higher levels than their peers. Results from this test can be used to verify existing information about a student or discriminate between those students already identified at the top end of performance. HAST-P can be used for whole cohort testing or as a second stage screening instrument to discriminate more finely between highly able students at the upper end of the scale. For more information see .

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Appendix 2

ACER General Ability Tests (AGAT) The ACER General Ability Tests (AGAT) is a test of general intellectual ability suitable for students in Years 2 to 10. AGAT is designed to assist teachers in their assessment of students’ learning potential and overall aptitude. Each test includes verbal, numerical and abstract reasoning items, giving a comprehensive picture of students’ general ability. For more information see .

Middle Years Ability Test (MYAT) The Middle Years Ability Test (MYAT) is a test of general ability designed to assist teachers in their assessment of students aged 10–15 years. The test can also be used to help in identification of gifted and talented students. As well as verbal and numerical reasoning items, MYAT includes non-verbal (or abstract) reasoning items, giving a more complete picture of students’ general ability. For more information see .

Abstract Reasoning Test (ART) The ACER Abstract Reasoning Test (ART) assesses student ability to use nonverbal reasoning skills. Such reasoning is widely applicable across the curriculum, and beyond school, and is related to scholastic outcomes. Abstract items require students to solve problems by hypothesising, identifying and applying patterns and relationships presented in diagrammatic form. Five levels of testing are available for students in Years 4 to 10 and above and are suitable for the general population and/or gifted students. For more information see .

Select-entry schools Victoria There are currently four selective entry schools in Victoria for students in Years 9−12: Melbourne High (boys only), The Mac Robertson Girls’ High (girls only),

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Appendix 2

Nossal High School (co-educational) and Suzanne Cory High School (co-educational). A centralised selection process is used to admit students to these schools and includes a common entrance examination. For more information see .

New South Wales In New South Wales there are 17 fully selective high schools, 25 high schools with selective classes (partially selective), a virtual selective class provision (Western NSW Region) and 4 agricultural high schools offering selective placement in Year 7. Entry is determined by the student’s results in the Selective High School Placement Test, together with their primary school’s assessment of their performance in English and mathematics. For more information see .

Queensland Brisbane State High School is currently the only selective entry public school in Queensland. Academic merit entry is based on an academic test in combination with school results and is available for entry into Years 8 and 11. Enrolment for cultural and sporting merit is offered across several year levels. For more information see < https://brisbaneshs.eq.edu.au/ general-information>.

Western Australia There are currently two selective schools in Western Australia. They are the Perth Modern School and John Curtin College of the Arts. Selection into these schools is based on the results of the Academic Selective Entrance Test. For more information see .

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Appendix 2

Select-entry programs Victoria Select Entry Accelerated Learning (SEAL) program In Victoria, there are currently 36 secondary schools that offer the Select Entry Accelerated Learning (SEAL) program. The SEAL program aims to focus on the learning needs of gifted and high potential students who are capable of working at a faster pace and in greater depth than their peers. Students usually complete years 7–10 in three years, which gives them an extended range of options for their final years of schooling. Secondary Schools with SEAL programs are situated throughout metropolitan Melbourne and rural Victoria. Each school is responsible for determining its own selection criteria. For more information see .

New South Wales New South Wales Selective High Schools Placement In New South Wales, students seeking placement in Year 7 at a selective high school must take the Selective High School Placement Test. There is a test for Year 7 entry and a test for entry in Years 8–12. For more information for Year 7 entry see . For more information for Year 8–12 entry see . Please note: entry to selective high schools in Years 8 to 12 does not depend on a centralised program as entry to Year 7 does.

Opportunity Class Placement Opportunity classes are for academically gifted and talented children in Years 5 and 6. These classes exist in schools throughout New South Wales. They provide intellectual stimulation and a rich educational environment.

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Appendix 2

Opportunity class entry does not depend entirely on a student’s performance in the Opportunity Class Placement Test as school assessment scores in English and mathematics are provided by the primary schools. For more information see

Queensland Queensland Government’s Queensland Academies There are three specialist state high schools for Queensland’s high achieving Year 10–12 students. These schools offer the opportunity to study with likeminded students through an internationally recognised curriculum. Acting as a bridge between high school and tertiary study, the Academies are designed to maximise the potential of bright students and prepare them for university. Students interested in enrolment for Year 10 at the Queensland Academies have several opportunities to sit the Entrance Test for the Queensland Academies. Three schools are currently part of the program: The Queensland Academy for Science, Mathematics and Technology (QASMT) at Toowong, the Queensland Academy for Creative Industries (QACI) at Kelvin Grove and the Queensland Academy for Health Sciences (QAHS) on the Gold Coast. For more information see .

South Australia South Australia’s Secondary Assessment Program for Gifted Children (IGNITE) The Ignite program is funded by the South Australian Department of Education and Children’s Services. Three secondary schools, Aberfoyle Park High School, Glenunga International High School and The Heights School, operate as a consortium. These three schools have been provided with resources to specifically cater for the needs of highly gifted students. The Ignite program recognises the individual needs of gifted students and therefore offers flexibility in student learning. Students are selected for entry

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Appendix 2

into this program on the basis of performance in an ACER assessment. When the results come back from ACER, students are invited to an interview on the basis of their ranking in the test. For more information see .

Western Australia Government of Western Australia’s Gifted and Talented programs Gifted and Talented programs are offered at 16 select public secondary schools in Western Australia. Students study with other gifted students and follow a curriculum designed specifically for their needs. They can apply to join one of three programs: a Selective Academic program, a Selective Language program or a Selective Arts program. All applicants for Gifted and Talented programs need to sit the Academic Selective Entrance Test and may also need to complete combined workshops, auditions and interviews, depending on the programs they are applying for. For more information see .

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References Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrich, P. R., Raths, J. & Wittrock, M. C. (Eds). (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Australian Council for Educational Research. (2011). ACER Submission to the Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Education of Gifted and Talented Students. Camberwell, Victoria: ACER. Retrieved 1 September 2012 from http://www.acer.edu.au/documents/ ACER_SUBMISSION_RE_GIFTED_AND_TALENTED_STUDENTS.pdf Australian Council for Educational Research. (2012). ACER Scholarship Tests – Written Expression [Webpage]. Camberwell, Victoria: ACER. Retrieved 12 October 2012 from http://www.acer.edu.au/documents/Scholarships_WrittenExpression-3.pdf Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2012). Mathematics – Rationale. Retrieved 12 October 2012 from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/ Mathematics/Rationale Cam, P. (2006). Twenty Thinking Tools. Camberwell, Victoria: ACER Press. Chappuis, J. & Chappuis, S. (2002). Understanding School Assessment: A parent and community guide to helping students learn. Portland, Oregon: Assessment Training Institute. de Bono, E. (2008). Six Thinking Hats. London: Penguin. Gagné, F. (2003). Transforming gifts into talents: The DMGT as a development theory. In N. Colangelo & G. Davis (Eds.), Handbook of Gifted Education (3rd edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books. Government of South Australia, Women’s and Children’s Health Network. (2011). ‘Difficulties faced by gifted children’ and ‘How you can help your gifted child’ (sections 8 and 10). In Gifted and Talented Children. Adelaide, SA: Government of South Australia. Retrieved 1 September 2012 from http://www.cyh.com/HealthTopics/ HealthTopicDetails.aspx?p=114&np=122&id=2253 Government of Western Australia, Department of Education. (2012). Gifted and Talented: Developing the talents of gifted children. Perth, Western Australia: Government of Western Australia Department of Education. Retrieved 1 September 2012 from http://det.wa.edu. au/curriculumsupport/giftedandtalented/detcms/navigation/parents Harris, K. R., Graham, S. & Mason, L. (2002). POW plus TREE equals powerful opinion essays. Teaching Exceptional Children, 34(5), 74–77. Masters, G. (2011). The Power of Expectation. Camberwell, Victoria: ACER. Retrieved 1 September 2012 from http://www.acer.edu.au/media/the-power-of-expectation/

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References National Mathematics Forum. (2008). National Mathematics Curriculum: Initial advice. Carlton South, Victoria: National Curriculum Board. Retrieved 21 November 2008 from http:// www.ncb.org.au/verve/_resources/Mathematics_Initial_Advice_Paper.pdf Parliament of Victoria, Education and Training Committee. (2012). Inquiry into the Education of Gifted and Talented Students. Melbourne, Victoria: Parliament of Victoria. Retrieved 1 September 2012 from http://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/images/stories/committees/ etc/Past_Inquiries/EGTS_Inquiry/Final_Report/Gifted_and_Talented_Final_Report. pdf Pressley, M. (2001). Comprehension instruction: What makes sense now, what might make sense soon. Reading Online, 5(2). Retrieved 21 November 2008 from http://www. readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/handbook/pressley/index. html Queensland Studies Authority. (2005). About Thinking, Reasoning and Working Mathematically. Brisbane: State of Queensland. Retrieved 21 November 2008 from http://www.qsa.qld. edu.au/downloads/early_middle/kla_maths_trw_about.pdf Resnick, L. B. & Klopfer, L. E. (Eds). (1989). Towards the Thinking Curriculum: Current cognitive research. Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Saddler, B. (2006). Increasing story writing ability through self-regulated strategy development: Effects on young writers with learning disabilities. Learning Disability Quarterly, 29(4), 291–305. Silverman, L. K. (2003). Characteristics of Giftedness Scale: Research and review of the literature. Westminster, CO: Gifted Development Center. Retrieved 1 September 2012 from http:// www.gifteddevelopment.com/PDF_files/scalersrch.pdf Sylva, K., Melhuish, E., Sammons, P., Siraj-Blatchford, I. & Taggart, B. (2007). Teaching and Learning: Research briefing, No. 24. London: Teaching and Learning Research Programme. Retrieved 21 November 2008 from http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/EPPE_RB_24_ FINAL.pdf Westwood, P. (2008). What Teachers Need to Know about Reading and Writing Difficulties. Camberwell, Victoria: ACER Press. Wilks, S. (Ed.). (2005). Designing a Thinking Curriculum. Camberwell, Victoria: ACER Press.

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A guide for students and parents 2nd edition

•

• • •

Cover images: © AISPIX by Image Source | Shutterstock.com © Dmitri Mikitenko | Shutterstock.com

2nd e d it i on

Scholarship and selection tests aim to identify the very best students for elite schools and accelerated learning programs. Many outstanding students sit these tests, but there are relatively few scholarship and select-entry places offered. To be of any use, scholarship and selection tests must identify very small differences in the academic performance of very high-achieving students. The tests are demanding and the process can be very competitive. As a result, preparing, applying and sitting for a scholarship or selection test can be a challenging process for students and parents — but this experience can also provide an opportunity for students to develop their academic skills and abilities in valuable ways. Scholarship and Selection Tests: A guide for students and parents aims to help students and parents to better understand scholarship and selection tests, so that students can develop their full potential and parents can support their children do their best when it counts. This second edition contains: updated advice on preparing for scholarship and selection tests, including all-new: ◗◗ information on dealing with gifted and talented students ◗◗ resources on select-entry accelerated, high-achievement and gifted and talented programs ◗◗ details on specific scholarship and selection tests ◗◗ case studies and insights from participating schools example questions and sample answers with detailed explanations, strategies and approaches suggestions on how students can develop the skills and abilities the tests target guidance on how to manage expectations and better understand results.

Schola r s hip and s election te s ts 

Scholarship and Selection Tests

Scholarship and Selection Tests

A guide for students and parents

ISBN 978-1-74286-156-2

2nd edition 9 781742 861562