Why Star Students Underperform on Reading Tests

Seemingly strong English students sometimes surprise us by underperforming on standardized reading tests. Here are three common obstacles that may explain why:

• Some students who love to read may not read accurately. Fast readers can get caught up in a story and skip whole sentences, if not paragraphs, and still have interesting insights about a novel or story. The brevity and variety of the excerpts on standardized tests, however, stump them. To overcome this, give students plenty of practice with short diverse texts—the kind you’ll find in Zinc’s “SAT/ACT Prep” channel.

• Strong readers who DO comprehend the passages can often get hung up on the answer choices, either misreading them or making overly complex rationalizations for wrong answers. Only one choice is right, though several will “sound” right. Teaching students to make simple, accurate predictions based on the passage BEFORE looking at the answer choices solves this problem.

• For many students, test anxiety gets triggered by the anxious energy of others in the room during exams. Research has demonstrated that reading literary fiction increases our empathy for the experiences of others, thus your top readers’ beneficial sensitivities may also make them more prone to panic on exam day. Simply making them aware of this possibility and equipping them with good test-taking strategies to focus on can help them perform to their true potential.

Addressing these issues will get your students’ scores where you were expecting them.