Preparing for the Reading Specialist Praxis Exam with Test Prep Books
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
Preparing for the Reading Specialist Praxis Exam
I earned my masters in reading 10 years ago. When I started the program in 2008, just getting the masters and passing the six hour comprehensive exam required by my program was enough to get a reading specialist endorsement in the state of Virginia. At the end of my three years, as I was preparing to take my comprehensive exam, the state passed a new law requiring teachers to take a Praxis exam after finishing their masters in order to become a reading specialist. I was so pissed and so broke after getting my masters that I never took my praxis, and I wasn’t ready to leave the classroom so I didn’t care.
I am still not ready to leave the classroom, but I would like to advocate for changes for the struggling readers at my school and I feel that adding this endorsement to my license will give me the credibility I need to be heard. SO, ten years later, here I am trying to prepare to take the Praxis Reading Specialist test (5301).
I still have all of my graduate materials, and I plan on working my way through my old binders, but I also bought a test review book. There were not a lot of options, so I went with Test Prep Books’ Praxis Reading Specialist 5301 Study Guide. I tried to figure out which authors contributed to the book (actual researchers?), but the “authors” are just labeled generally as “TPB Publishing.” This made me a bit wary since I can’t exactly trust who put these materials together.
I am only on the first few pages but the book is only okay. It lacks depth and context, and I am finding that I need to heavily supplement the book with my own research. So, it’s better than nothing and it has given me a roadmap for my studying, but for anyone else who is rusty and needs more depth, here are the resources that I have used to supplement my understanding of each section.
My program labeled the developmental stages of spelling differently than what was in this book, so I checked out this resource from Reading Rockets. Reading Rockets also labeled the stages differently than what was in this book, but it was close enough and I was able to line it all up: https://www.readingrockets.org/article/invented-spelling-and-spelling-development.
The authors do go into each stage later in the book, but they should use a parenthetical phrase to explain this so that readers don’t panic if they are feeling rusty about their knowledge of the levels of spelling development.
Page 15- “Practice Questions”
I thought these questions were put in the wrong section at first because two of the questions do not connect to any of the material presented in the pages before.