14: Reading Before Writing

Best Practice 14: Reading Before Writing

Always tell students to read the entire exercise before writing anything. It may seem obvious to a teacher, but this will be unbelievably hard for some students to do.

This is a good idea for two reasons:

Although there may be many “right” answers, an awareness of the full assignment can help students select the “best” answer. 2. It encourages students to answer questions out of order. This allows students to either a) come to terms with a passage in their own way or b) facilitate a confidence-boosting elimination strategy.