Test-Taking Strategy Instruction for Adolescents with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Many secondary students with EBD are mainstreamed in regular classes and are required to take tests in those classes to demonstrate their competence with regard to their mastery of the content. Unfortunately, these students often do not use strategies that would help them meet this critical classroom demand. The purpose of this study was to develop a comprehensive test-taking strategy that includes many of the test-wiseness strategies cited in the literature and to validate an instructional methodology for teaching this strategy to secondary students with EBD. Through the use of a multiple-probe across-students design, the instruction was shown to be effective in helping students to master the use of the steps of the comprehensive test-taking strategy and to apply them in a generative way to a series of novel tests. Preliminary evidence collected in targeted mainstream classes indicated that the students were applying the strategy to their regular class tests and that their scores on these tests improved. The results of this study are similar to those achieved in a companion study with students with learning disabilities, indicating that EBD and LD students can successfully receive strategic instruction together since they learned the strategy at comparable rates and achieved comparable levels of mastery and generalization.