Five Common GPS SATs Errors
Help your pupils avoid these pitfalls when the big day arrives.
During any practice SATs sessions, if pupils have previously made (and self corrected) common mistakes such as only ticking one option or not reading the question carefully, they can hopefully avoid such pitfalls on the day. With this valuable experience, their answers in the SATs papers can be a true reflection of their knowledge and ability in English, rather than a reflection of their developing skills with 'exam techniques'.
Instructional errors aside, here are LBQ's top 5 tricky GPS questions that have caused the most problems for pupils:
1. Verb Tenses. GPS Set 1. Question 65
The most common incorrect answer shows that pupils knew that the progressive form of the verb ends with ing, but they didn't realise that they needed to add the present tense auxiliary verb am alongside it.
Revising these tenses with LbQ's mastery Question Sets 'Understand Auxiliary Verbs' and 'Using Past Progressive and Present Progressive Verb Tenses' may be helpful for Year 6 pupils to remind them of knowledge learned in Year 3 or Year 4. (Click on the links to sample these Question Sets. Be sure to give some wrong answers to see the unique feedback that your pupils will receive on the LbQ platform.)
2. Commas in a List. GPS Set 1. Question 7
A likely reason for this misconception is pupils not reading the question or the sentence carefully enough. LbQ has a mastery and a practice Question Set to help pupils use commas to clarify meaning: 'Using Commas to Clarify Meaning' and 'Practise Using Commas to Clarify Meaning'.
3. Identify an Adverbial. GPS Set 1. Question 59
A likely cause of this difficulty is that many pupils struggle to identify adverbials if they are not words that end with ly. Pupils can practise identifying a range of adverbials with Question Sets from LbQ, such as 'Using Adverbs to Express Time and Place' and 'Using Fronted Adverbials'.
4. Identifying Prepositions. GPS Set 1. Question 44
The most common misconception for this question was the omission of 'on' as a preposition. Retrieval of knowledge from Year 2/3 could be a reason for misconceptions about this class of word, so pupils could revise their knowledge of prepositions with LbQ's 'Use Prepositions' Question Set.
5. Using Hyphens. GPS Set 1. Question 45
LbQ has a mastery and a practice Question Set to help pupils get to grips with hyphens for compound adjectives. 'Using Hyphens for Spelling' and 'Spelling Compound Adjectives'.
See these resources in action by booking a chat with us today.