Tips for scoring well in reading comprehension tests

Tense

This is the most common type of mistake made by students. Train your child to use the correct tense by giving the following type of question: "What did John eat for lunch?"

Answer

There are two parts to checking the answer.

1) Did the child lift an answer?

An answer is considered to have been lifted if it was copied and pasted word to word with no change at all. Unless the question requires a sentence or phrase to be given, please avoid lifting an answer.

2) Did the child answer the question?

Students need to check whether they have crafted their answers such that they had answered the question.

For example, same question as point 1 above. The answer should be "John had noodles for lunch." and not "John's mother cooked noodles for John.”

Punctuation

Omission of full stop, commas and missing upper cases are common. These are easy to rectify as long as the child is careful.

Spelling

Ask your child to spend a few minutes checking through the spellings before the work is passed up.

Infer 

To infer is to understand unstated ideas using logic. Inference is a vital skill for the Reading and Listening sections. However, you must be careful not to infer too much. Any inference must be supported by the passage.