<p>I read this thread and all the good suggestions in the links. I've seen students who raise their SAT scores 80-100 points by vocab study, but those were the "last" 80-100 points (going from the 700's to the 780 or 800 stratosphere). But others have all kinds of experiences. It can only help a student in every way to do that dinnertime flashcard routine, but just don't stop there because if the PSAT's show in the 40's something else is also going on that needs to be addressed.</p>
<p>Some posters say their kids overanalyze the passage, so just lightening up on that helps; "the answers are all in the passage..." not from general knowledge, in other words.</p>
<p>But there's an opposite possibility, too. Lots of kids, especially those who don't quite read enough as the OP suggested, have trouble distinguishing between denotation and connotation in a written text. Denotation is what the words actually say, connotation is what the words might mean to someone particular. I just asked my college-age daughter for a good example, and she came up with a goodie: On a cigarette package, there is a warning, "Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health." So the literal meaning, the denotation, is that "if you smoke this, you might get sick."<br>
But the connotation, to teenaged readers, is "Neat! Cigarettes are cool because grownups are warning me against them!"
Sidenote: as we parents all know, one of the hardest things for teens to do is consider things from another person's viewpoint, not their own!</p>
<p>Now imagine a passage where they write about cigarettes and warnings, and drop a hint about a reader in the passage who demonstrates some oppositional thinking to adult lessons...THEN they ask what the cigarette warning words "mean."
One test-taker will answer what it means to them, but the other test-taker will get a higher score by first asking, "are they asking what I think it means, or what the person in the story might think?"
Once they nail down whose point-of-view is being asked for, if it's about the kid in the story who evades adult wisdom, then the kid must project what meaning THAT kid would derive from the cigarette package warning.</p>
<p>So that's three sub-skills: !) Be ready to forego one's own point-of-view and recognize they often ask about the character's point-of-view; 2) Be able to pick up little clues and hints about the other character and his point-of-view;
3) Be able to extrapolate, extend, apply the other character's point-of-view into the test question. In other words, if the story-kid (not the test-taker) generally detests parental advice, he would/could/might take the warning to mean, "Cigarettes are cool because adults are warning me off of them."
Nowhere in the passage would it say precisely that the character thinks cigs are cool, and they won't show the character actively disobeying and smoking..that's all too literal. Rather, they would set it up with little "hints" about other things the character does to indiicate he resists adult guidance, cares about peer thinking, is oblivious to health, etc.
Now, after reading all the above, try to answer this test question, "What does the character believe about the warning on the cigarette package" a) Cigarettes could hurt me. b) If I smoke, people will admire me.</p>
<p>So I guess the OP might see if her D needs to look harder into the passage. That's usually it, but when you say, "the answer is all in the passage..." that's even true above. Just also consider and learn how to distinguish denotation from connotation. That's also "all in the passage" but it doesn't hit you like a<br>
ton of bricks, exactly.</p>