Praxis Core Reading measures your fluency and comfort with academic reading at the high school and early college level. The Reading tasks are easier and more straightforward than reading on other graduate exams such as the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT. Still, if you don\u2019t do a lot of spare-time reading or haven\u2019t taken an English class in a few years, Praxis Core Reading can be a little challenging. In this post, we\u2019ll look at 10 things you can do to re-acclimate to academic reading and master your Core Reading skills for a top score.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
1. Practice reading.<\/strong> The best way to improve your reading skills is to read as much as you can. So practice, practice, practice. And don\u2019t just read anything. Seek out Praxis-like reading materials. Core Reading Praxis materials are light reading related to science, art, history, and other common academic subjects. Read content from popular news and education websites and read texts meant for high school learners and first year college students.<\/p>\n 2. Practice writing. <\/strong>Writing and reading have a symbiotic relationship. If you write on a regular basis, you\u2019ll have a better understanding of other people\u2019s writing. Take opportunities to write a little bit each day, whether you\u2019re journaling, posting your thoughts to social media, or writing practice essays for the Praxis Core.<\/p>\n 3. Understand the different question types. <\/strong>There are two main types of questions on Praxis Core Reading: content questions that ask about specific information in the text, and analysis questions that prompt you to analyze<\/em> a reading passage on a deeper level. Within those two categories, there are several additional subtypes of questions. Know the question types and subtypes. Make note of the kinds of questions you excel at and they question types you struggle with. Then build on your strengths and work on your weaknesses during practice.<\/p>\n 4. \u201cRead outward\u201d to find the answers to detail questions.<\/strong> When questioned about a specific detail in the passage, look first at the words immediately surrounding the detail. Very often you\u2019ll find the answer right there. But if you don\u2019t, start checking further back\u2014the sentences before and after the detail, and then the whole surrounding paragraph if need be. This is the fastest, most efficient way to answer narrowly focused Core Reading Questions.<\/p>\n 5. Check for main ideas when answering a \u201cwhole passage\u201d question.<\/strong> Some Reading questions are about the entire passage. You may be asked to state the passage\u2019s main idea or purpose, summarize its organization structure, infer the author\u2019s opinions, or identify the passage\u2019s chief argument. It can be tempting to try to read the whole passage to get the answer, but the answer will be easier to find if you simply skim the passage for the most important ideas. The beginnings and ends of passages often reveal the claim, purpose, or main idea. And if you can identify the main idea of each paragraph, you can identify the passage\u2019s structure.<\/p>\n 6. Learn to understand vocabulary in context. <\/strong>Praxis Reading vocabulary is comparable to the words you learned in high school, and matches the vocabulary level of many popular newspapers, magazines and websites. So memorizing long lists of vocabulary words that might appear in the Praxis is not really necessary. Still, there are over one million words in the English language, and it\u2019s always possible to encounter a word or phrase you don\u2019t understand. The real skill you need to build is understanding written words in context.<\/p>\n 7. Keep an eye out for synonyms of keywords in the passages, questions, and answer choices.<\/strong> Often the question and answer choices will paraphrase ideas form the passage, using synonyms to the keywords from the reading. For instance, a question or answer choice might talk about something being \u201cleft out\u201d or \u201cmissing,\u201d while the original passage will use a synonym such as \u201cabsent.\u201d Recognize these kinds of connections quickly, and you\u2019ll have good pace and accuracy in Core Reading.<\/p>\n 8. Read every word of any infographic you see. <\/strong>Some Praxis questions are based on information from graphic organizers such as charts, tables, and graphs. Charts contain less information than passages, so they can\u2019t really be skimmed. Check all details in a visual carefully as you answer related comprehension questions. By the final question of a visual-based Core Reading activity, you should have read every word in the graphic organizer.<\/p>\n 9. Make sure you are comfortable with infographics and visual literacy by test day.<\/strong> Praxis Core Reading uses infographics to test your visual literacy. Informational visuals can seem simple enough at a glance. But infographics are surprisingly easy to misread if you don\u2019t have much experience reading charts, graphs, tables, weekly schedules, and so on. Seek out graphs and charts in your reading practice. They\u2019re especially common on news and business websites. With practice, you can get very comfortable with visually formatted information, and this can serve you well on test day.<\/p>\n 10. When analyzing an argument, don\u2019t make too big of a leap.<\/strong> Avoid ifs<\/em> when analyzing an argument and looking for inferences. For example, never tell yourself that the author might<\/em> be implying something if <\/em>a certain situation is true. Make judgements about arguments and implications based only on facts and situations that are clearly, directly communicated by the writer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Praxis Core Reading measures your fluency and comfort with academic reading at the high school and early college level. The Reading tasks are easier and more straightforward than reading on other graduate exams such as the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT. Still, if you don\u2019t do a lot of spare-time reading or haven\u2019t taken an English class in a few years, Praxis Core Reading can be a little challenging. In this post, we\u2019ll look at 10 things you can do to re-acclimate to academic reading and master your Core Reading skills for a top score.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2438],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[4914],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-praxis-reading"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n