STR (293) EXAM QUESTIONS WITH VERIFIED SOLUTIONS LATEST UPDATE 2026

STR (293) EXAM QUESTIONS WITH VERIFIED SOLUTIONS LATEST UPDATE 2026 Assets-based approach - Answers a teaching philosophy and method that builds on students' strengths and what they can do rather than their deficits. Student strengths include cultural, family, and linguistic background, among other things Data-based decision-making - Answers making decisions for the school, grade level, or classroom based on actual data rather than just intuition. Derivational affix - Answers an affix that changes one word to another (e.g., red to redden; empathy to empathize) Differentiated Instruction - Answers tailoring curriculum and pedagogy to meet students' individual needs Direct Instruction - Answers The teacher defines and teaches a concept, guides students through its application, and arranges for guided practice until mastery is achieved. Discourse - Answers written or spoken communication Dyslexia - Answers A broad label defining a learning disability that affects language processing, often leading to difficulty with reading Dysgraphia - Answers A severe difficulty in producing handwriting that is legible and written at an age-appropriate speed Emergent Literacy - Answers The reading and writing experiences children participate in before they begin formal schooling. Evidence-based practices - Answers teaching practices based in research and professional wisdom. Explicit Instruction - Answers A type of instruction that involves direct explanation of a concept or idea to a student. The teacher's language is concise, specific, and related to the objective. The actions of the teacher are clear, unambiguous, direct and visible Fidelity of Implementation - Answers the degree to which an intervention, curriculum or program is delivered as intended. Flexible Grouping - Answers Grouping students according to shared instructional needs and abilities and regrouping as their instructional needs change. Group size and allocated instructional time may vary among groups. Guided Reading - Answers An instructional practice where small groups of students with similar needs meet for instruction from the teacher and can practice a new skill with the support of the teacher. Inflectional suffix - Answers A suffix that creates a new form of the same word. It may express: • plurality or possession when added to a noun (e.g., cats, computers) • tense when added to a verb (e.g., racing, helped) • comparison when added to an adjective and some adverbs (e.g., greenest) Language Arts - Answers the study of language, including reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Viewing and representing is sometimes also included in the language arts. Morpheme - Answers Smallest unit of meaning in a word (e.g., unwise--two morphemes (un wise), walked--two morphemes (walk ed)). Nonreader - Answers An individual who is unable to read connected text, despite normal intelligence, lack of sensory deficits, absence of obvious neurological challenges, and much reading instruction. Partner Reading - Answers Students read aloud with a partner, taking turns to provide word identification help and feedback. Phoneme - Answers The smallest unit of sound in a word. In English there are approximately 44 phonemes Pragmatic - Answers how language is used in certain context Prosody - Answers reading with expression, proper intonation, and phrasing. Part of reading fluency. Phonology - Answers the way a word is pronounced. One of the components of oral language. Modeling - Answers A teaching procedure where the teacher overtly demonstrates a strategy, skill or concept that the students will learn Morphology - Answers the way words are formed: inflectional endings, etc. National Reading Panel - Answers A group of literacy professionals brought together by the federal government to review reading research and issue recommendations. Their report, issued in 2000, was highly influential in reading instruction National Literacy Panel for Language Minority Children and Youth - Answers A group of bilingual education and literacy professionals brought together in the early 2000s to examine the research about the development of literacy in language minority children. Response to Intervention (RTI) - Answers A multileveled instructional and prevention system to monitor and support readers who may need extra help. Tier One: Core Classroom Instruction Tier Two: Targeted Small Group Instruction Tier Three: Intensive Individual Intervention Scope and sequence - Answers The overall 'roadmap' for a skills-based instructional program showing what content will be taught and what order it will be taught in. Scaffolding - Answers The support given to students in order for them to arrive at the correct answer or to learn a concept. This temporary support assists the student in achieving what they otherwise could not achieve alone. Semantics - Answers definitions of words Syntax - Answers sentence structure in both oral and written language Stages of Reading Development - Answers · Pre-Reading or Pre-Alphabetic · Beginning- initial reading and decoding stage or partial to full alphabetic stage · Transitional- confirmation and fluency stage or consolidated-alphabetic stage · Intermediate- reading to learn new content · Advanced- multiple viewpoints stage Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) - Answers state standards for what children should be able to know and do, organized by grade level Texas Prekindergarten Guidelines - Answers Guidelines delineating behaviors and skills that prekindergarten children should be able to do. Thematic Unit - Answers A group of lessons that integrate the language arts and that cut across two or more subject areas on a particular theme or topic Think Aloud - Answers A teaching method where the teacher explicitly shares their thinking processes during reading by verbalizing what they do as they read Conferencing - Answers A quick meeting between the teacher and student on a specific topic. Conferences can be used for brief, just-in-time lessons, or as an assessment tool. Constructed Response - Answers Questions that require the test taker to put together an answer instead of just choosing an already provided answer (i.e., essay, short answer, etc.). Continuous Progress Monitoring - Answers Tests that keep the teacher informed about the student's progress throughout the year Criterion-Referenced Test - Answers Formal, published tests where student achievement is measured against a predetermined competency or set of knowledge. TExES and STAAR exams are criterion-referenced. Diagnostic Assessment - Answers Tests used to measure a variety of language, reading, or cognitive skills. Usually given when a child fails to make adequate progress after being given extra help. Fluency Probe - Answers An assessment for measuring fluency, usually a timed oral reading passage at the student's instructional reading level. Formal Assessment - Answers Published tests that follow a prescribed format for administration and scoring. Formative Assessment - Answers Informal, frequent assessments, usually given at the beginning and middle of a unit or lesson, to monitor student learning and provide ongoing feedback to the teacher and students Grade Equivalency - Answers Comparison to how other people in the norming group do. For example, a fourth grader with a 5.3 grade equivalency means that the student does as well as a fifth grade student in the third month who takes the same test as the fourth grader did Informal Assessment - Answers Does not follow prescribed rules for administration and scoring; has not undergone technical scrutiny for reliability and validity. Examples include teacher-made tests, end-of-unit tests, running records, anecdotal records, kidwatching, etc. Informal Reading Inventory (IRI) - Answers A type of assessment which contains a series of leveled paragraphs followed by a comprehension analysis. The purpose is to assess the student's independent reading level. Miscue Analysis - Answers An assessment where a student reads aloud a piece of text and the teacher records and analyzes the places where what the reader said is not what is in the text. Norm-Referenced Test - Answers Formal, published tests where a particular student's achievement is compared against that of a large group of peers. Oral Retelling - Answers An assessment of comprehension where a student is asked to retell the story to the teacher after reading it. Percentile - Answers A comparison of a student's score with those of other students in a norm group indicating the percentage of students in the norm group that the student outscored. A student who had a percentile of 78 scored better than 78% of the students in the norm group. Portfolio Assessment - Answers Student achievement is shown through a collection of student work over a period of time. Pre-assessment - Answers An action or strategy before instruction that gathers information on what students already know in order to inform teaching. A post-assessment is given to students after the lesson to measure their learning. Pseudo-word assessments - Answers An assessment of phonics knowledge that uses a list of pseudo-words, which are strings of letters that resemble real words but that have no meaning. Raw Score - Answers A test score without any sort of adjustment or transformation, such as a simple number of questions answered correctly. A scaled score is a raw score that has been converted so that score reporting across groups is consistent Frustrational Reading Levels - Answers The level at which a reader reads at less than 90% accuracy (i.e., more than one error per 10 words read). Text is difficult for the reader Instructional Reading Level - Answers The level at which a reader can read text with 90% accuracy (i.e., no more than one error per 20 words read). Text engages the student in challenging but manageable text. Independent Reading Level - Answers The level at which a reader can read text with 95% accuracy (i.e., no more than one error per 20 words read). Level is relatively easy text for the reader. Reliability - Answers a test consistently produces the same results (i.e., the same student would get similar results when taking the test twice in a short time period). Rubric - Answers A scoring guide that lists criteria for success and that is used to evaluate the quality of student work Running records - Answers An assessment tool that identifies the number of correct words a student pronounces in lines of text. Self-assessment - Answers Students examine and reflect upon their own work and learning Screening - Answers Doing a quick assessment to see which students need additional support. · Universal screening: Brief screenings to identify students who may be at risk conducted with everyone from a group of students, such as all students in a grade level. Standards-based instruction - Answers Pedagogy and curriculum based on a set of learning standards. These standards are often set at a state or national level and are academic expectations for children Summative assessment - Answers An evaluation of a student's achievements at the end of a unit, lesson, or grading period, usually comparing student learning against some standard or benchmark. Validity - Answers How well a test measures what it says it measures Writing sample - Answers An example of student writing, often used for an assessment of spelling and writing knowledge. Cognates - Answers Words that are related by descending from common ancestral languages. (e.g., family & familia, desert & desierto). Continuous sounds - Answers A sound that can be held for several seconds without distortion (i.e., /m/ /s/) Dialects - Answers Variants of a language English Language Proficiency Levels (ELPS) - Answers Texas standards for language proficiency for English learners. Beginning (ELPS) - Answers Students at this level have little to no ability to understand spoken English. Intermediate (ELPS) - Answers Student at this level have the ability to understand simple, high-frequency spoken English used in routine settings Advanced (ELPS) - Answers Students at this level have the ability to understand, with appropriate support, grade-appropriate spoken English High Advanced (ELPS) - Answers Students at this level have the ability to understand, with minimal support grade-appropriate spoken English. Expressive language - Answers Language which is spoken. Expressive capacity is the amount and kind of language a person can produce Idiom - Answers A phrase or expression that differs from the literal meaning of the words; a regional or individual expression with a unique meaning. (e.g., it's raining cats and dogs) Language experience approach (LEA) - Answers A learning engagement where students participate in an experience, then through a whole-class discussion students contribute sentences about the experience. The teacher writes these sentences on chart paper exactly as the students dictate. This can then be used in a variety of learning experiences Oral language - Answers Spoken language. There are five components of oral language · Phonology: the way a word is pronounced · Morphology: the way words are formed: inflectional endings, etc. · Syntax: sentence structure · Semantics: definitions of words · Pragmatics: how language is used in particular contexts Receptive capacity - Answers The amount of oral language that can be heard and understood. Silent period - Answers A time where beginning-level English language learners listen actively but do not produce oral language Stages of first language acquisition - Answers · Prelinguistic stage (birth to six months): The baby cries, coos, laughs, and makes other sounds. · Babbling (six to 12 months): The baby makes nonspecific sounds from all human languages. · One-word (holophrastic) stage (1-2 years): The child speaks single words in isolation, in his or her first language. · Two-word stage (24-30 months): The child forms two-word phrases or strings that reflect the language being acquired. The vocabulary increases; the child begins to learn words at the rate of one word every two waking hours. · Telegraphic speech (30-36 months): Children begin to utter short phrases like telegraph messages, without formal grammatical structure. · Fluent speech (three years +): The child learns grammar and syntax (patterns of sentence formation) with surprising rapidity and accuracy; sentences increase in length and complexity. Speech delay - Answers when a child misses developmental milestones related to speech (i.e., a one year old who doesn't babble or speak in mock sentences) Stop sounds - Answers A sound that can only be said for an instant without distorting the sound (i.e., /b/, /d/, /g/, /j/, /k/, /p/). Words beginning with stop sounds are more difficult for children to sound out than words beginning with continuous sounds. Word play: - Answers Experimenting with language through rhymes, riddles, chants, phoneme substitution, etc. Alliteration - Answers The repetition of stressed, initial phonemes of words in connected text (e.g. Harry the happy hippo hula-hoops with Henrietta.) The repeated sound is generally made by a consonant and the words are usually consecutive words or close together. Auditory discrimination - Answers recognizing different sounds in paired spoken words Blending - Answers Combining sounds in a word Phonemic awareness - Answers The ability to notice, recognize and manipulate the phonemes in spoken words. The conscious ability to segment spoken words into their constituent phonemes. This is the highest level of phonological awareness. Phoneme isolation - Answers Recognizing individual sounds in a word (e.g., /p/ is the first sound in pan) Phoneme substitution - Answers Changing one phoneme in a word for another phoneme, which makes a new word. (e.g., cat to pat, bike to bake) Phoneme manipulation - Answers Adding, deleting, and substituting sounds in words (e.g., add /b/ to out to make bout; delete /p/ in pat to make at; substitute /o/ for /a/ in pat to make pot) Stages of phonological awareness - Answers 1. Listening 2. Rhyme/Alliteration: Rhyming: Matching the ending sounds of words, starting with the vowel sound (e.g., cat, bat, hat, that). Some students may never master rhyming; move on to other phonological awareness activities. Alliteration: Producing groups of words that begin with the same initial sound (e.g., Two tired turtles tried to take a trip); most tongue twisters exemplify alliteration. 3. Sentence Segmentation: Segmenting sentences into spoken words (e.g., the sentence "The girl ate two candy bars" segments into six words). 4. Syllable Blending and Segmentation: Blending syllables to say words (e.g., pan cake blends to pancake). Segmenting words into syllables (e.g., cactus segments to cac tus). 5. Onset-Rime Blending and Segmentation: Blending the initial consonant or consonant cluster (onset) with the vowel and consonant sounds spoken after it (rime) (e.g., /f/ /at/ blends to fat). Segmenting the initial consonant or consonant cluster (onset) from the vowel and consonant sounds spoken after it (rime) (e.g., slid segments to /sl/ /id/). 6. Phoneme Blending, Segmentation and Manipulation: Blending phonemes into words (e.g., /m/ /a/ /n/ blends to man), segmenting words into individual phonemes (e.g., cat segments to /k/ /a/ /t/), and manipulating phonemes in spoken words (e.g., /b/ substituted for /k/ in cat makes bat). Rhyming - Answers Two or more words that have the same ending sound, starting with the last vowel sound. (Shake Fake Ache) Vowel - Answers A speech sound that is produced when the breath is not blocked by the teeth, tongue, or lips. In written English vowels are represented by the letters a, e, i, o, and u. The letters w and y can also sometimes be vowels. Stages of acquiring the alphabetic principle - Answers · Pre-alphabetic: children do not form letter-sound connections to read words; if they are able to read words at all they do so by remembering selected visual features. · Partial alphabetic: children learn the names or sounds of alphabetic letters and use these to remember how to read words. This often begins with just using the letter/sound correspondences at the beginning or ending of a word. · Full alphabetic: children can form complete connections between letters written in words and phonemes in pronunciations. · Consolidated alphabetic: readers operate with multi-letter units that may be morphemes, syllables, or subsyllabic units such as onsets and rimes. Common spelling patterns become consolidated into letter chunks, which make it easier to read words. Alphabet - Answers A series of abstract marks that are assigned identities and sounds for use in written contexts. English is written using an alphabet. Alphabetic principle - Answers The concept that letters and letter combinations represent individual phonemes in written words. The relationship between letters and sounds; how sounds in spoken words are related to letters in written words. This includes a knowledge of phonemic awareness and a knowledge of phonics. Chunking - Answers A decoding strategy for breaking words into manageable parts (e.g., Yesterday-- yes ter day) OR dividing a sentence or a piece of text into smaller phrases where pauses might occur naturally. Closed word sort - Answers An activity where children are given a list of words and asked to sort them into predetermined categories Concepts of print - Answers Understanding how books and written text work (i.e., identifying the front and back cover of a book, directionality of text, identifying the title of a book, knowing where to begin reading on a page, etc.) Conventions - Answers Certain established patterns in language and writing (i.e., write left to right, a space before and after a word, margins on a page, punctuation, etc.). Consonant cluster - Answers Two or more consonants next to each other in a word Consonant blend - Answers Two or more consecutive consonants; each retains its distinctive sound. strap black tree send Consonant digraph - Answers Two consecutive consonants representing one phoneme. (e.g., shake, three, peach) Directionality - Answers Knowledge of the direction in which written text works (in English, left to right and top to bottom on a page) Grapheme: - Answers Written symbol for a sound. In English, graphemes are letters. Graphophonemic knowledge: - Answers The understanding that written words are made up of systematic letter patterns that represent sounds in pronounced words. Inflectional endings or inflectional suffixes - Answers · plurality or possession when added to a noun (e.g., cats, computers) · tense when added to a verb (e.g., racing, helped) · comparison when added to an adjective and some adverbs (e.g., greenest) Irregular words: - Answers Words that do not follow common phonic patterns (were, was, laugh, been) Letter recognition - Answers The ability to identify letters and relate printed letters to spoken language. Letter/Sound correspondence - Answers The matching of an oral sound to its corresponding letter or group of letters. Onset - Answers The consonant or consonant cluster before the initial vowel in a syllable. (e.g., cat, strike, tie, time) Open word sort - Answers An activity where children are given a list of words and asked to sort them into two or more groups based on what they notice about the words. Orthography - Answers A written system for representing language Phonics - Answers The relationship between graphemes (letters) of a written language and the phonemes (sounds) of spoken language. Print awareness: - Answers a child's understanding of the nature and uses of print; understanding that print is organized in certain ways (i.e., spaces between letters, left to right direction, top to bottom on a page) Rapid Naming: - Answers Being able to quickly say the name of a letter without thinking when you see the letter. Rapid naming is sometimes difficult for dyslexic students. Rime - Answers The vowel and remaining letters after an onset in a syllable. (e.g., cat, strike, tie, time, clock R-controlled vowels - Answers Vowel followed by an -r. This letter pattern affects the sound of the vowel, with the vowel sound being lost in the r sound (e.g., star, corner).