How to Prepare Your Child for Gifted Testing - Study Tips & Strategies

Our team of experienced educational experts will guide you and your child through the test preparation process to ensure that it goes as smoothly as possible and that your child is calm, confident, and prepared for the test.

It is important to know exactly which test your child will be taking, and at which level. Find out when and where the test will be administered, what time your child should arrive, how long the test will take, and what your child needs to bring to the test (i.e., no. 2 pencils, calculator, snack, etc.). Make sure that you have filled out and submitted all relevant paperwork (and payment if required) to the right place. Find out if there are any available practice materials provided by your child’s school or the test administer.

Before you take the test, you should be prepared in terms of tools (such as pencils and erasers) and also conditions. Tests usually have a fixed format, for example, a fixed number of questions per subject, a time limit, particular restrictions such as the use of calculators, and more. One way knowing the conditions can help is distributing time. Knowing that there is a bathroom break can help you better organize your time during the test instead of wasting useful minutes while you should be answering questions

Once you know all the relevant information, you can now focus on helping your child prepare for the test. Guiding your child through this process may be difficult and overwhelming, but with the help of TestPrep-Online, your child will learn good study habits and test taking skills. This will help reduce stress levels both for you and your child.

Start by reading the study guides. These contain information about the different kinds of questions in the test and strategies on how to approach these questions. Once you have read the study guides and become familiar with the topics of the test, you can being the simulations and practice drills.

You can read the explanations for the first few questions to get a feeling of how a proper solution should look. After that, you can try to simplify the solution to see that you understand it entirely. Remember that some questions can be solved by ruling out the rest of the answer choices. Naturally, developing the skills necessary to identify an answer choice that is clearly incorrect takes practice. However, after solving a few questions you should understand more intuitively what makes an answer more evidently incorrect, and what characterizes them.

It may be difficult to keep your child engaged and focused on studying. Be sure to be supportive of your child and determine his or her most effective studying method together. Learn more about engaging your child in this video: 

Some children may suffer from a performance anxiety called test anxiety. While it is normal to feel nervous before a test, some children suffer from intense anxiety that may negatively affect test performance.

Confidence is the key to succeeding the day of the test. Finish the full-length simulation and all the different questions and you will understand what to expect from the test and that will directly boost your confidence the day of the test. If you trust that you have studied responsibly, you have nothing to worry about.

Learn more about test anxiety and how you can help alleviate it in this video:

Dana Lebental, Ed.D is TestPrep-Online’s Educational Consultant. In these videos, Dr. Lebental, formerly a Science Specialist and Teacher in the Compton Unified School District, addresses common issues associated with preparing for gifted tests and discusses the importance of these tests. These videos will help you learn how to improve your child’s test taking strategies and develop good study habits.

TestPrep-Online offers top quality test preparation material at an affordable price. Help your child reach his or her goals by preparing for gifted and talented tests with comprehensive preparation packs.

Our study packs each include full-length gifted and talented practice tests, modeled after the actual tests. Each test and drill offers detailed explanation and thorough progress reports once completed. With our fun video tutorials and hundreds of additional sample questions, your child will feel prepared and confident for the test. Our interactive online interface is easy to use, child-friendly, and easily accessible. Learn more about how our website works.

Create a fun study environment by scheduling a rigorous preparation before the test. You can take a few days per topic, or simply learn about the entire exam at the same time. Moreover, short breaks can sometimes be more efficient for your child as opposed to long study sessions. Make sure to consider different options when you choose a study strategy. After that, it is simply a matter of reading our material to best be prepared for the test.