Ed 595M: Applied Research Seminar

Student Teaching Seminar — On-line

Comprehensive Exams Information

Here are the course units:

Course Main PDP development Comps. preparation
Legal issues Licensure stuff Employment

MAT Comprehensive Exams

Spring '07 comprehnsive exams are scheduled for Thursday, May 3rd and Friday, May 4th. You should already be signed up and should have designated how you’ll be writing exams and in what format (1 or 2 days). You should receive a letter soon confirming registration and giving you some logistical information about the whole process. If you have any questions, comps. are administered by the Graduate Office so call Diana Leos at (503) 838-8492.

Structure of the exam

First session — 3 hours

Your initial three hours of writing will cover five areas: Foundations, Multicultural Education , Special Populations, Critical Literacy, and Computer Science Education.

Second session — 4 hours

Your remaining four hours of writing will cover six areas: Curriculum, Classroom Management, Differentiated Methods, Assessment, Action Research, and Adolescent Psychology.

General structure of questions

Questions are typically open-ended, broad in scope, and ask you to apply what you learned to an issue of practice.

How to be successful
  1. Be very organized in your writing — spend about 5 minutes planning what you’ll say and then use all the good writing conventions you learned in WR 101.
  2. If you get caught in a time crunch, outline what you would have said — use bullets if necessary but don’t leave any question blank.
  3. Don’t try to be comprehensive in your efforts — pick out important ideas and relate them to the question. The idea is always to demonstrate your ability to bring course content to bear on your practice and experience as a teacher.
  4. It sometimes pays to drop names of theories and theorists — this is one of those times! Refer to theorists, give names of people who write in that area, identify specific theories and strategies — leave no question that you know what you’re talking about!
    5.

How to prepare
  1. Give yourself a couple hours a week to prepare — cramming doesn’t work well here!
  2. Go back to your materials from each of the 12 classes listed above. Look over your notes, any textbooks, and the projects and papers you wrote for the big ideas or central themes of the class. Make a cheat sheet of big ideas, big names, and central themes — commit them to memory for each course.
  3. Consider the practical experiences you’ve had that relate to those themes or big ideas. What experiences can you draw on that are related to the main ideas in those courses?
    4.

Want to see some good study questions?