What is the Test Content?

READING  In the Reading test, students will be presented with a variety of materials, both informational and literary. The questions will measure students' ability to answer questions in factual, interpretative, and evaluative comprehension. They may have to answer questions about main idea, author's purpose, the meaning of a word in context, and other types of comprehension questions.

WRITTEN EXPRESSION  This is a test about writing in Standard English. Some of the questions focus on the most appropriate way to express the ideas in a piece of writing. Questions may address organization, sentence structure, clarity, and effective or appropriateness of expression. Other questions ask students to identify the line of text that contains an error.

MATHEMATICS  Questions on the Mathematics test are drawn from the areas of number sense and operations, algebraic patterns and connections, data analysis/probability/statistics, geometry, and measurement.

ABILITY  This test measures students’ learned reasoning abilities. Although grounded in biological processes, these abilities are developed through in-school and out-of-school experiences. The questions assess students’ abilities to reason with somewhat more novel questions that use spatial and figural content. The questions show how well students use their reasoning skills to solve problems they may or may not have been directly taught.