Wisdom Education Helping your child reach their academic potential
Wisdom Education - Year 5 & Year 6 - Selective School Test Course
Information for students undertaking the Selective School Placement Test in Year 6
The Wisdom Education Selective School Test Course is a comprehensive program designed for Year 5 students to train and prepare them for the Selective School Placement Test in Year 6.
The Wisdom Education Selective Shool Test Course begins in mid-March of Year 5 and runs until the actual exam in March the following year.
The course is unique in that it allows students to practise and review exam style questions under exam conditions. By sitting for the Wisdom Education Selective School Test Course, your child will sit and revise 35 Selective School Placement style tests.Our professional teachers will help your child reach their full academic potential to confidently sit for the actual Selective School Placement Exam in Year 6.
Our Selective School Test Course is divided into 5 stages and is run every Friday 4:00pm - 7:30pm during the school term.
Year 5 - Term 1 - Selective Foundation Course
Stage 1: Term 1 Selective Foundation Course (4 Weeks)
If you are serious about studying for the Selective School Placement Test you cannot miss this Foundation Course - only offered once a year and it provides the ground work for all Selective style questions.
The Term 1 Selective Foundation Course (SFC) is a special preparation course designed to maximise student performance in the Selective School Test Course from Term 2.
Each week different question types are covered and students receive an instruction on the best strategies for answering the style of question. Teachers provide examples and teach efficient and effective techniques for interpreting questions and working towards correct solutions.
Students will also be given homework questions based on the new topics to consolidate their learnings.
The Path to Selective Success
"You must give to get, You must sow the seed, before you can reap the harvest." - Scott Reed
Year 5 - Term 1
Foundation Course
Year 5 - Term 2
Selective Test Course
Year 5 - Term 3
Selective Test Course
Year 5 - Term 4
Selective Test Course
Year 6 - Term 1
Final Test Course
How does the Selective School Test Course benefit my child?
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Speed and accuracy - Selective School Test Course increases students' accuracy and speed. (e.g. General Ability test paper comprises 60 questions in 40 minutes – 40 seconds per question)
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Reading the question - Believe it or not, many students make mistakes by reading the question incorrectly or misunderstanding the question all together.
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Test taking strategies - Learn the most effective test taking strategies. Whether it be reading, writing or multiple choice.
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Tracking results - Weekly result sheets indicate a student's weak areas, giving immediate feedback to parents about which areas the student need to improve on.
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Parents can get an idea which score level their child will achieve in the actual exam and make or revise the most suitable school choices in their application.
Why is Selective School important?
Selective high schools cater for highly achieving, academically gifted students. These schools can provide intellectual stimulation by grouping gifted and talented students together, concentrating school resources and using specialised teaching methods.
There are only:
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17 fully selective high schools. All classes are academically selective.
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25 high schools with selective classes (partially selective). Partially selective high schools have both selective and community classes.
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4 agricultural high schools (three of which offer boarding places). Agricultural high schools are selective high schools that emphasise the study of agriculture, with the boarding sections giving some priority to isolated students.
Further Information for Parents: Entry into Selective Schools
Year 7 entry into these schools is determined by the student's results in the Selective High School Placement Test in English (including reading and writing), mathematics and general ability, together with their primary school's assessment of their performance in English and mathematics. Other evidence of academic merit may also be considered.
Entry into Years 8 to 12 is determined using criteria developed by each school's selection committee.
Partially selective high schools have both selective and community classes.
Please refer to this link for a listing of selective High Schools: http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/gotoschool/types/shs_ahs_details.php
Selective School Test components
There are four tests. Three of the tests consist of multiple-choice questions with answers recorded on computer-marked answer sheets. These three tests are:
1. Reading - 30 questions - 40 minutes - multiple choice.
2. Mathematical Reasoning - 35 questions - 40 minutes - multiple choice.
3. Thinking Skills - 40 questions - 40 minutes - multiple choice.
4. Writing test - 1 question - 30 minutes - open response.
The writing which is most likely to gain the highest marks will have a combination of the following:
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A title which sums up in a word or short phrase what the whole piece of writing is about interesting and original or distinctive ideas, stories, descriptions, arguments, depending on the type of writing
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Language which is fluent and precise and uses interesting and more complex sentence constructions and vocabulary.
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A complete structure so that there is a progression through stages leading to a conclusion.
School assessment scores
The school assessment scores will be moderated according to the performance of the candidates from your child's primary school in the reading, writing and mathematics tests. Moderating the school assessment scores makes them comparable state wide and gives school assessment scores and test scores in English and mathematics equal weighting.
Schools provide school assessment scores based generally on the student's performance on the school's curriculum in Year 4 and up to the end of Year 5. Schools have the discretion to set their own assessment criteria. The scores are provided for:
English - out of 100
Mathematics - out of 100
What is Thinking Skills?
Thinking Skills Assessment (TSA) is an assessment of two kinds of thinking:
1. Problem Solving: reasoning using numerical skills. Many of the problems encountered in academic and professional work are novel. No ready ‘off-the-peg’ solution is available. The task is to find or create a solution.
2. Critical Thinking: reasoning using everyday written language. The skill of Critical Thinking is essential for many areas of academic study and often involves considering an argument put forward to promote or defend a particular point of view. Historians put forward arguments to explain and interpret past events, while scientists use argument to evaluate evidence from their experiments. Whatever the subject of study, it is necessary to understand the arguments presented by others and to be able to assess whether the arguments establish their claims.
Both Problem Solving and Critical Thinking are assessed by multiple-choice questions. In each case a stimulus is presented, followed by the stem (question) and five options. One of the options is the correct answer (key) and the remaining four options (distractors) are wrong. In the case of the Critical Thinking questions, the stimulus is a passage of text. In Problem Solving, the stimulus may include a diagram, a table of information (a railway timetable for example), or a graph. The options may also be graphs or diagrams.
PROBLEM SOLVING questions
There are three kinds of Problem Solving question in the test, each assessing a key aspect of insight into unfamiliar problems. The three kinds are Relevant Selection, Finding Procedures, and Identifying Similarity. Although most questions fall into one category, some questions fit into one or more of the categories.
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Relevant selection - selecting relevant information required to reach a solution.
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Finding procedures - Sometimes you will find that even if you have selected all of the relevant information, no solution presents itself. You then have to find a method or procedure which you can use to generate a solution. Typically you will have three or four numbers which have to be operated on. This aspect of Problem Solving is called Finding Procedures
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Identifying similarities - In these questions you will typically be presented with information or data represented in more than one way (including e.g. charts, tables, etc.). To answer the question, you will need to understand the relationships between these and to identify any similarity in the data they represent.
CRITICAL THINKING questions
Critical Thinking in the context of TSA can best be made clear by the following definition: In an argument, reasons are put forward as grounds for a conclusion. The argument is a good argument provided its conclusion follows from the reasons. That is to say, if you accept the reasons, you must accept the conclusion. For the purposes of this test, the reasons given should be accepted as being true.
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Identifying the main conclusion.
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Drawing a conclusion.
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Identifying an assumption.
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Assessing the impact of additional evidence.
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Detecting reasoning errors.
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Matching arguments.
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Applying principles.