Masters of multiple choice! Titans of the bubble test! Here's our guide to what trips kids up and how to keep them on top.

You probably know all too well that even the strongest students can sometimes miss the tricks of taking multiple-choice tests. Third-grade teacher Audrey Kennan, of New Jersey's Town Center Elementary School, certainly does. "My students are sometimes so intent on giving the right answer," she says, "that they're reluctant to guess." Like many test-takers, Kennan's students sometimes leave answers blank, even though they have enough information to attempt an educated guess.

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With the right encouragement and prep work, however, kids can approach a multiple-choice test with the confidence it takes to succeed. For Kennan, that means spending time talking about "smart guessing" and how to do it. "You have to give them permission to do things that we as adults take for granted," she explains. Here we share more solutions to five common test problems kids face, so that on the big day they'll go from tripping up to showing off what they know.

* Testing Trip-Up #1: Skipping the question

Your student Kate loves multiple-choice, since it means the answer is right there. In fact, she doesn't waste time reading the whole question before she chooses an answer--why bother since the correct choice is obvious from the first few words?

** Smart Solution: Mindy Messinger has her fourth graders at P.S. 206 in Brooklyn, New York, cover answer choices with a scrap piece of paper while they read the question. She lets them know that it doesn't matter that the answers are there--first they need to read and try to respond to the question on their own. Once the children have come up with reasonable solutions, they uncover the choices and see which one most closely matches their work. This tactic helps students avoid going straight to the answers and instead apply the knowledge they've learned in your lessons.

* Testing Trip-Up #2: Falling for tricky words

You know that Pablo knows his mammals, but when answering "Which of these is not a mammal?" he wavers between "dog" and "horse" because he misses that one crucial word.

** Smart Solution: Move over, number-two pencils: The highlighter should be your students' must-have testing tool. Children can use a highlighter to identify key words in the section directions and to mark question words that almost always act to trick test-takers. Sheila Flaxman, a teacher-educator in Little Rock, Arkansas, drills her students on pay-attention words like always, never, and except. Discuss what these words mean with your children and explain how they might show up on an exam. Vickie Witt, a teacher from Bluefield, West Virginia, suggests having students try out each answer using the question's wording. For example, have students say to themselves, "A dog is not a mammal. True or false?" and so on.

* Testing Trip-Up #3: Running out of time

There are only 15 minutes left in your one-hour test, and you can see that Rachel is still on page three of the exam booklet--which means she hasn't even made it through half of the test. This doesn't surprise you, however, since Rachel always seems to lose track of time when she's working on in-class assignments.

** Smart Solution: Prior to test day, try an exercise in elapsed time by covering the clocks in your classroom for an hour and asking students to draw a star on a piece of paper every time they think 10 or 15 minutes has passed. At the end of the time period, discuss how many stars children have on their papers and how many intervals have actually occurred. Even if children have access to a clock during a test, this exercise can give them a better internal sense of time.

Scott Mandel, author of Improving Test Scores (Zephyr, 2005), also recommends teaching kids to read through every question on a multiple-choice test, answering questions to which they're sure they know the correct answers as they read. Mandel encourages students to checkmark questions they'll be able to answer with more time and effort and mark with an X questions for which they think they might have to guess the answer. After answering the questions they immediately know, children go back first to the checked problems, and then to the X questions, if time allows.

* Testing Trip-Up #4: Filling in the wrong bubbles

After lots of one-on-one teaching, Laura's finally getting fractions, and she gives you a thumbs-up mid-test to let you know it's going well. But when you get the results, they're disappointing--and as you go through the test with her you discover that Laura must have skipped a line on the bubble sheet.

** Smart Solution: Aracelly Gallardo, a teacher at North Ranchito School in Pico Rivera, California, has her first graders use an index card as a guide when completing bubble sheets--an easy idea your older students will find just as useful. Model how to use the card on an overhead projector at least a few days before the test. You might also invest in a package of brightly colored cards (white ones may get lost in test day's paper shuffle).

* Testing Trip-Up #5: Forgetting familiar strategies

You spend hours going over strategies for answering multiple-choice questions, explaining, for instance, that it's best to cross out answers that are definitely wrong. Still, Alex comes to you crying after the test. "When the test started, I forgot everything you told us," he says.

** Smart Solution: Last year, Audrey Kennan's third graders came up with a chant to help them remember their test-taking strategies: "When do we read the questions? First! When? First! What do we read first? The questions! What? The questions!" Kennan says it aided in reading short passages, since her "question-first" policy meant that students knew what to look for while reading. Pam Tabor, a Miami teacher, uses a different chant with her fifth graders: "Multiple choice/ Pick the best/ One's real close/ And two make you guess." This simple saying reminds students that on a typical multiple-choice question, there's one "best" answer, an answer that's pretty close to the correct one, and two tricky answers that are, in reality, wrong.

Finally, at Lakeshore Elementary School in Greece, New York, fourth-grade teacher Susan Sulimowicz has her students paint a test-day t-shirt with the acronym "QAR." It stands for "Question, Answer, Relationship," and it's a quick reminder that students need to read the question first, then the answers, and finally look for the answer that has the closest relationship to the question. "The shirts really helped kids master multiple-choice questions," says Sulimowicz. "In fact, 87% of our fourth graders passed the English Language Arts test--the highest scores in our district."

RELATED ARTICLE: putting their minds at ease

We asked child psychologist Adele Brodkin how to best prepare for multiple-choice tests.

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*** PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT: Students will feel more confident the more you prepare them for what to expect. Test prep should happen all year long, anytime a lesson offers the opportunity to talk strategy.

*** COVER THE DETAILS: "The mechanics of testing are tough," notes Brodkin. Have students practice filling in their answers on a separate sheet of paper and answering questions in a timed situation.

*** TURN YOUR FROWN UPSIDE DOWN: Kids will pick up on anxieties you may have about testing. It's normal to feel like you're being measured, but keep a sunny attitude and remember, it's a learning experience.