RICA Subtest 1

A kindergarten grade teacher is preparing to give a phonemic awareness assessment. The teacher and student sit together, and the teacher asks, "What do you see in this picture? [The teacher shows a picture of a coat.] The student says, "It's a coat." The teacher says, "A coat, that's correct. Now, let's say the word coat together slowly: /c/.../ō/.../t/." [The student pronounces the word with the teacher.] The teacher says, "How many sounds do you hear in the word coat? The student says, "Three." The teacher says, "Great job! There's three sounds in the word coat. Now, I'd like you to do this for some more words." This assessment is an effect way to measure a student's ability to perform which of the following phonemic awareness tasks?

• Segmenting and blending the phonemes in isolation

• Using onsets and rimes

• recognizing the amount of phonemes contained in a word

• relating phonemes to whole words

Which of the following spelling development stages do students usually begin to demonstrate an understanding of the correspondence between letters and sounds?

• precommunicative

• semiphonetic

• phonetic

• transitional

There is a small group of first graders who have demonstrated the ability to sound out and blend words that use the simple short-vowel phonics pattern. Their teacher would like to help them begin to develop whole-word reading, such as building automatic word recognition skills to identify words that follow this patterns. Which of the following instructional strategies would most effectively work for this purpose?

• Begin the lesson with a teacher read-aloud that follows an activity of Echo Reading and then moves into using the Gradual Release of Responsibility model to choral reread the students' favorite texts that include some simple words

• The teacher should schedule silent independent reading practice using the i + i strategy from word lists based on the students' oral language vocabulary

• Provide modeling and guided student practice sounding out simple, regular words subvocally and then reading them aloud normally

• Exposing students to the environmental print found within the classroom to provide exposure to everyday words and phrases

Which method would most effectively in helping second-grade students who show the ability to decode skills in order to read 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 the inflection

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

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

• directly and explicitly teach the -ing ending in the context of an instructional unit

A fourth-grade teacher would like to implement a regular silent reading time to continue providing the student with the opportunity to build their reading fluency. The teacher designs differentiated reading lessons that build fluency skills for individual students in the class. While doing this, the teacher should keep in mind that using silent reading to promote fluency:

• requires students' sight-word knowledge to be at grade level.

• should be limited to narrative texts in the early elementary grades

• is most effective when students use texts at or above their instructional reading level.

• should be limited to students who have already acquired automaticity in their reading.

A student in the sixth-grade has been assessed at reading grade-level narrative texts fluently. This student also demonstrates a high level of comprehension with narrative texts; however, the student struggles to read aloud a grade-level expository passage about a topic with which this particular student lacks background knowledge in. When reading aloud, this student hesitates to read the passage and often stops to read sentences again and even reread whole paragraphs. Afterward, the student demonstrates limited comprehension of what was read. Which of the following is most likely causing this student's difficulty for reading the expository passage fluently?

• the student's insufficient background knowledge does not support basic comprehension of texts

• the student's lack of exposure with this type of academic-language structure presented in the text negatively affects his reading comprehension

• the student is not able to monitor information while reading, called the Monitoring-of-Progress strategy.

• the student lacks grade-level phonemic analysis skills needed for accurate decoding of the words in the text.

A second-grade teacher designs a lesson to help a small group of students read at a more appropriate rate. Two students in the group have been assessed at the same level for both reading rate and reading automaticity. Given this information, which strategy should the teacher use to most effectively improve the students' reading need?

• Create a paired silent reading lesson, where the students read the same passage silently while sitting together. They stop after a specified amount of time to talk about their understanding of the text.

• Use Repeated Reading, where each student takes turns reading aloud from the same text to the other student while the other student follows along silently.

• Create a paired reading activity, in which the students read side by side and share text aloud in unison, gradually increasing their pace as they proceed through the text.

• Use a timed partner-reading activity, in which the students take turns silently reading a shared text for one minute while the other student keeps time and says when to stop.

A first grade teacher is conducting a 1-to-1 reading assessment with a student. When the student comes to the word, tentacles, they pause and try to pronounce it by sounding it out. The student's pronunciation sounds like "ten-tac-oles." This assessment best shows which of the following reading pronunciation error?

• This child pronounces the root word but doesn't know that phonological shifts should be used to segment the sounds.

• This child doesn't yet demonstrate the ability to pronounce consonants contained in the middle of a word.

• This child doesn't yet use the correct phonics rules to ending syllables.

• This child demonstrates an understanding of pronunciation through syllabication and phonics awareness correctly but does not recognize the word.

A group of fifth-grade students are having trouble spelling  vocabulary from their science textbook, such as condensation, dissolve, insulator, temperature, precipitation, and sedimentary. Which instructional strategy would likely be most effective in helping these students improve their scientific term spelling?

• Demonstrating to the students that we can to split scientific vocabulary into syllables to find their correct spelling.

• Providing pop quizzes to make students accountable for memorizing these scientific terms.

• Teaching a lesson on etymology with these terms, so the students have an understanding where their root spelling derives from.

• Keeping a small stack of scientific dictionaries made for young learners and teaching them how to look up the words that they don't know.

A fourth-grade teacher gave a spelling test and noticed that multiple students misspelled the word schist, which is a type of rock. To help the students remember the correct spelling, this teacher wrote the word schist on the whiteboard. Then, the teacher explained how schist derived from the the Greek word, skhistos, which means "to split". The students then found ways to relate the spelling with its original term and meaning. This activity helps develop students' reading skills primarily by:

• Providing historical context to improve their ability to decode multisyllabic words.

• Teaching them the skills to distinguish similarly spelt words.

• Generating motivation through expanding their vocabulary knowledge.

• Teaching them methods for spelling and decoding through the use of systematic study skills.