Personal Best Test Training: Technical Reading™ is designed to give students the strategies they need to approach such visual information with confidence. These technical reading skills will transfer to real-world situations throughout students' academic careers and beyond. 

Goal

PBTT: Technical Reading is designed to teach students the skills and strategies needed to do their personal best on questions that require understanding, interpreting, and applying graphical information in timed testing situations, particularly on the ACT Science, the SAT and PSAT Reading, and the SAT and PSAT Writing and Language tests.

Preparation for the ACT, SAT, and PSAT

ACT

The ACT Science Test is packed with difficult—and often confusing—graphics. The perceived difficulty, compounded by the fact that this test comes at the end of several hours of test-taking, leads some students to gloss over the more graphics-laden passages without trying. 

Item sets on the ACT Science Test are based on topics from the life sciences, chemistry, Earth/space science, and physical science. The test presents students with scientific information, data, and experiment summaries interweave regular text with charts, graphs, tables, and other visual information. The questions require students to analyze, interpret, evaluate, and apply information, as well as compare alternative viewpoints.

SAT

The SAT now embeds graphical information — tables, graphs, and charts — in the passages on both the Reading and the Writing and Language tests. While graphical information isn't the subject of such focus on the SAT compared to the ACT Science Test, the challenges these reading materials present are similar, as are the approaches to dealing with them.

PBTT: Technical Reading presents students with an attack strategy that will empower them to approach graphical information in a systematic and efficient way, and to answer the related questions effectively. The process also works to demystify these often intimidating reading materails. 

Backpack-Friendly Practice Books

PBTT: Technical Reading (64 pages) provides:

• Strategies for analyzing, interpreting, evaluating, and applying information presenting visually, e.g., in graphs, charts, and tables
  
• Tips for answering questions based on passages combined with graphical information
• 10 practice sets, using ACT and SAT-style graphics and technical reading passages

Click to download sample pages from the PBTT: Technical Reading Student Guide.

A complimentary, eight-page teacher's guide is included with each set of 30 student booklets purchased. The PBTT: Technical Reading Teacher's Guide provides activities to enhance and extend learning.

A Comprehensive Solution

PBTT: Technical Reading is one piece of a comprehensive solution for preparing students to do their best on the ACT and PSAT/SAT. For an overview of the entire Personal Best Test Training program, click here.

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Click below to request more information about PBTT. Or call 877-927-8378. We'll be happy to answer your questions.

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