Schools will be back in session in just about a month, and for high school students of a certain age, major tests like the SAT and ACT are not far behind.
Some teens may have spent part of their summer already prepping for these tests, which colleges use as one barometer of a student's potential for success. Others start their studying as school begins, while a few have already been studying for years.
Milwaukee writer Kreigh Knerr has seen all these varieties of students in his work in test prep. His company is called the Knerr Learning Center, but he hopes his new book, Tips from the Top: A Tutor to the 1% Reveals His Tricks, will reach far more people than he could ever work with personally. He shared some of the lessons he wrote about.
"I was getting sick of people saying, 'Oh, I found the right answer!'" Knerr says. "Too often, kids read the best answer and they auto-correct it in their brains to right, and then they think, 'Oh yeah, it's like a deductively true-false,' this sort of binary system. [I'm] really helping people to get an idea of an actual reasoning model in play and it's one that we use in real life."
Knerr's book is full of tips to help students rethink their approach to reading and testing, often by pointing out simple changes in perspective that make the tests easier to understand. He will talk about his new book at Book World in Mequon on September 12th.
