My 14-y/o daughter is dyslexia and ADD. She has come miles, with solid reading, math, and writing skills. She now holds her own in an academically challenging school, with very good grades. Our problem is with test taking skills. While she gets A/B’s on assignments, she often flunks tests — even when rereading information, taking notes, practicing tests, etc. Any thoughts? This seems to be the main glitch now. After all these years and all this achievement (it took her several years to learn to read, and math is just now becoming a comfort zone), I hate to see this next hurdle undermine her self-esteem.
Re: Need Help Test TAking Skills
Geodob, you advice is good, and we have done that to some degree, but maybe not enough. She has been learning how to take notes appropriately, and that has helped some, but just doesn’t seem to make enough difference for her. We’ll talk with her more about it, and see if we can find anything that might give us a better clue.
Re: Need Help Test TAking Skills
Would your dd be comfortable working with a peer tutor? Sometimes a peer who is in the same classes can be very helpful — pointing out what the teacher is probably looking for on tests, differentiating between what is important to know and what is detail, etc. It might be worth trying for $5 an hour or so after school to see if it helps….
Nancy
Re: Need Help Test TAking Skills
Students wityh LD/ADD often do better on exams if they are split up into two or three smaller tests. The teacher has to agree to this, of course. It can be posed to the teacher as an experiment, “Let’s just see if this helps.” Instead of an exam being four pages long, the student can do one or two pages at a sitting.
Hi Nicsmom,
This could be Test Anxiety?
You say that she has overcome much of her previous learning difficulties. But no doubt, most of her life experience of ‘doing tests’, was done before she had overcome her difficulties, to some degree.
Where I would suggest that she had a high level of anxiety as she faced each test.
A crucial issue with Anxiety, is that it overwhelms our ‘thinking’.
Where our mind is flooded with thoughts of our previous tests. Which makes it extremely difficult to concentrate on doing the test.
Perhaps you could talk to her about this, and ask her what is going through her mind, when she sits down to take a test?