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Standardized testing and auditory learners


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Ds10 is an auditory learner (and worker), so he struggles with the quiet, still, read-silently format of standardized tests.  His scores do not reflect his knowledge -- he almost always does better with oral questions than with written questions.

 

Is there any way to help an audio-related student do better on standardized tests, esp the ones given in high school like the ACT or SAT that parents can't give at home?

Thanks!

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I'm just tossing this out there off the top of my head but does he have any learning challenges that might warrant an evaluation through a neuropsychologist?  Audiologist?  Depending on the results, you might be able to get some accommodations, including and especially the questions being read to him.

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For my students that are auditory learners, I tell them to whisper the sentence or information under their breath - their ears process better than their eyes. And I remind them that if and when they stumble over parts of a sentence (esp in the SAT writing section) that should pay close attention to that spot - there's often a problem in the grammar or structure that their ears caught. (with most of my teenagers, their ears are more reliable about hearing mistakes than their eyes are at seeing them)

 

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I'm just tossing this out there off the top of my head but does he have any learning challenges that might warrant an evaluation through a neuropsychologist?  Audiologist?  Depending on the results, you might be able to get some accommodations, including and especially the questions being read to him.

 

He doesn't seem to.  In fact, he's so generally normal that I only stumbled on the problem in the middle of our battery.  *sigh*  So much for this year's test....

 

 

Whisper reading (I think that's what it's called), where the kid silently mouths the words while reading, allows the material to be processed via the auditory pathway--or so I've read. 

 

 

For my students that are auditory learners, I tell them to whisper the sentence or information under their breath - their ears process better than their eyes. And I remind them that if and when they stumble over parts of a sentence (esp in the SAT writing section) that should pay close attention to that spot - there's often a problem in the grammar or structure that their ears caught. (with most of my teenagers, their ears are more reliable about hearing mistakes than their eyes are at seeing them)

 

Thanks, EKS and showelott.  I was kind of thinking along the same lines, but I didn't know there was an actual name for it or that their ears would catch what their eyes didn't.  This helps immensely!  Thank you.

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 but I didn't know there was an actual name for it or that their ears would catch what their eyes didn't.  

This is from my own non-scientific experience :-)

 

The latest brain/learning research (a la Daniel Willingham and others) debunks the myth of "types" of learners. 

 

But the majority of my SAT kids do better on tough questions when they read them out loud - all of a sudden they hear the problem.

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