How NOT to prepare for the Selective Placement Test

For parents of students who aspire to receive a Selective School placement for their high school years, there’s a lot of information to absorb to help your child adequately prepare for the highly competitive Selective placement test.

As you conduct your internet searches, you’re likely to come across endless articles and blogs with tips on how to prepare your child for the placement test. Teachers, tutors and even other parents offer knowledge from their experiences, making it easily accessible to you at the click of a button.

Our own website even contains a wealth of information for you to learn about the Selective placement test (find FAQs here) and how best to prepare your child (read more here). Reading all this content can result in information overload, especially if read in a short timeframe!

So, this blog brings you something different.

In this blog, we share how NOT to prepare your child for the Selective placement test. There are certain approaches to test preparation to be wary of when considering a tutor to guide your child through the process or if you choose to provide this support yourself.

Keep reading for the information others won’t tell you.

What not to do to prepare

With each year, the Selective placement test is becoming more challenging and unpredictable. Many capable students miss out not just because they lack preparation, but also because they engage in the wrong type of preparation.

We don’t want that to happen to your child. To avoid incorrect preparation, here are a few things you should look out for:

• Some tutoring centres make parents teach by giving students a lot of homework that they cannot complete independently. This can be counterintuitive as parents who are time poor then hire another home tutor to help their child with the homework set by the tutoring centre. Not only is this not a helpful approach to Selective test preparation, but it can also be costly for you as a parent.
• Just doing mock/practice tests is not enough to do well in the test. This can encourage rote learning rather than engaging in creative and critical thinking. To excel in the Selective placement tests, students need to learn how to think for themselves to answer what can be sometimes unpredictable questions.
• Setting stale and repetitive tasks to teach the content covered in the Selective placement test. This approach can cause students to become bored and disengaged. Rather, they need to love, be inspired, and enjoy the process of learning and preparing for the test.

What you should do to prepare

So, how do you prepare for the unpredictable nature of the Selective placement test? Here are a few ways:

• Empower your child with the skills to deal with questions they have not seen before.
• Equip your child with thinking skills that no matter how unusual the task is, they still perform well.
• Enrol your child in tutoring that teaches them how to think and outperform even if the test is completely unfamiliar.
• Adding to the previous point, set homework should be related to what they are learning at the tutoring centre (i.e. revision, which can be done independently).

Don’t waste your valuable time and money on tutoring that does not work. This will only set your child up for disappointment if they miss out on a Selective placement.

What tutoring does work?

At Global Education Academy, we specialise in helping students meet their learning goals, including receiving placement into a Selective high school.

Our Selective Preparation Program, targets the topics assessed in the Selective Placement test. The courses are taught by qualified high school teachers who know how to take a student from primary level and upskill them to the Selective and high school level. The course covers:

• English – exposes students to all genres of texts. It includes all levels of Reading Comprehension and all types of questions that are required for the selective test. In addition, students expand their vocabulary and learn grammar and punctuation in a structured format.
• Writing – students learn all the genres that may appear in the test including writing an advice sheet, narrative, persuasive, discussion and information and news report. Students are exposed to the marking rubric and how their writing gets assessed, learning how to improve. They also learn how to dissect and analyse a question and a given stimulus, so they write with confidence and to the point, achieving high scores.
• Mathematical Reasoning – Our unique strategy of problem solving, the UPSL strategy (understand, plan, solve and learn), gives students an advantage and a higher level of knowledge that can be applied to any setting or situation.
• Thinking Skills – we teach the two main components: problem-solving and critical thinking. Problem solving consists of mathematical or logical problems embedded in a practical context. Critical thinking consists of inductive reasoning (from common sense and general knowledge) and deductive reasoning (solved and taught using mathematical type analysis).

Students also learn how to apply their thinking skills in exam conditions and use tools to reduce cognitive load. Through the course, students master exam and time management techniques with test-specific skills to help shorten their response time and give them the advantage of having extra time to think about their answers.

Interested in enrolling your child? To receive a spot in our Selective preparation course, the first step is to book a Selective Benchmark Assessment for your child. This involves a 90-minute assessment followed by a 30-minute feedback session with a teacher. It gives us insight into your child’s ability to cope with advanced courses and enables us to identify strengths and weaknesses in their learning.

To book a FREE Benchmark Assessment for your child, click here.