RICA MC Practice

A sixth grader who is advanced in most areas of reading has difficulty completing assigned reading selections. He appears motivated when he begins reading, but he has difficulty keeping his attention on the task at hand. Which of the following would be his teacher's best initial strategy for addressing this difficulty?

• adapting the student's reading assignments to reduce their complexity and level of cognitive challenge

• telling the student that his grades will be based in part on his ability to improve his concentration when he works on reading assignments

• breaking down the student's reading assignments into small steps and helping him learn to monitor his own attention and progress

• managing the student's reading assignments so that he generally has only one to work on at any given time

The use of rhyming texts for kindergarten read-alouds is likely to promote the reading development of kindergarten students primarily by:

• fostering their phonological awareness

• increasing their vocabulary knowledge

• enhancing their understanding of story elements

• improving their letter recognition skills

An emergent reader frequently reverses some letters and numbers during writing tasks. Which of the following strategies would be most effective in helping this student develop more accurate letter formation skills?

• providing the student with supplemental practice writing lists of words that are spelled with the target letters

• having the student practice tracing the target letter shapes with a finger while saying aloud the sequence of steps to form each letter

• providing the student with a supplemental handwriting workbook that describes the formation of the target letters in a series of steps

• encouraging the student to vocalize words when writing, especially when the rods contain the target letters

In the word chimpanzee, which of the following pairs of letters is a digraph?

• ch

• mp

• an

• ee

Which of the following approaches would be most effective in helping first-grade students who have the prerequisite decoding skills learn to decode words that end in the inflectional morpheme -ing?

• explicitly teaching the students to read the unit -ing in isolation before teaching them to decode familiar words that end in that inflection.

• using think-aloud during a guided reading to model how to use contextual analysis as a strategy for recognizing words ending in -ing

• having students practice reading word lists that include words ending in both the more familiar rime -ing as well as the inflection -ing

• teaching the inflectional ending -ing in the context of an instructional unit on identifying open and closed syllables in multisyllabic words

An eighth grade teacher wants to help students improve their spelling of scientific vocabulary, including the terms listed below: barometer, centimeter, dehydrate, hydrogen, microscope, telescope, thermal, thermometer. Which of the following instructional strategies is likely to be most effective for this purpose?

• Showing students how to divide scientific terms into syllables to facilitate accurate spelling

• conducting practice drills to help students memorize the irregular spelling patterns of words

• familiarizing students with the spelling and meaning of Greek morphemes in scientific terms

• helping students determine correct spellings by dividing the words into onsets and rimes.

A fourth grade student who reads grade level narrative texts with fluency and excellent comprehension is struggling to read a grade-level content area passage about a topic with which the student is familiar. The student reads the passage hesitantly, frequently stopping to reread clauses or entire sentences. Afterward, the student demonstrates limited comprehension of what was read. Which of the following factors is more likely disrupting the student's fluent reading of the text?

• Insufficient background knowledge to support basic comprehension of the text

• lack of experience with the academic language structures used in the text

• insufficient monitoring of comprehension while reading the text

• lack of grade level word analysis skills for accurate decoding of the words in the text

A second grader has demonstrated the ability to decode individual words accurately, but she reads very slowly and laboriously. When the teacher tries to engage the student in oral reading activities, she says she feels embarrassed and would rather read silently. Which of the following modifications to instruction would be most appropriate and effective for helping this student improve her reading fluency.

• encouraging her to serve as an audience for other students' oral reading until she demonstrates willingness to read aloud herself

• having her reread text several times using whisper reading to build her fluency and confidence with respect to the text

• teaching her how to use self-monitoring as she reads to improve her literal comprehension and ability to read with prosody

• providing her with explicit phonics instruction to improve her word identification skills before requiring her to read aloud

(Competency 8)
To read accurately, at an appropriate rate, and with appropriate expression means: 

• Fluency
• Automaticity 
• Intonation
• Analysis

(Competency 8)
To read with appropriate "expression" which includes emphasizing certain words, using variation in pitch (intonation), and pausing  after punctuation is:

• rate
• prosody
• fluency
• comprehension