Pioneer High School students preparing for ACT

Juniors in the state of Nevada must take the ACT tests as one of the requirements to graduate from high school. The tests consist of math, reading, writing and science.

The students also are under time restraints and some of the material they’re being tested on may prove to be difficult.

This year juniors will take the ACT in March. In order to address some of these concerns, as well as ensuring the students go into this test as comfortable as possible, Pioneer High School is implementing various test taking strategies to help prepare our students.

Students who have a class in the Carson Online lab on campus will devote Fridays to ACT material. The first thing students will do is take practice tests. These tests will help the students understand what’s expected of them as well as become comfortable under time restraints.

Once these are completed, we will discuss different test taking strategies. Some of these include making sure to read all the answer choices before deciding the best answer to the question, understand how answers that seem similar are different and how to eliminate answers which prove to be clearly incorrect.

Once we have reviewed main concepts that will be on the ACT, the students will take another practice test to see how they have improved.

This process will continue until they take the test in March. The hope is the students will know the expectations of the ACT as well as have been given appropriate tools to walk into the testing room feeling confident.

Shannon Archer heads Carson Online Lab at Pioneer High School.