Episode 240 | Elizabeth Breau | Part -2 | Prep for Success | The Knowledge Entrepreneurs Show
Learn More About Elizabeth Breau
Explore Elizabeth's expertise through the following links:
- LinkedIn: Connect with Elizabeth Breau and her educational expertise
- SAT/ACT Tutoring: Discover her comprehensive test preparation and reading instruction methods
- Literature-Based Learning: Access her approach to building critical thinking through classic and modern texts
- Educational Philosophy: Learn about her advocacy for meaningful reading experiences and college readiness
Key Takeaways
Episode Description
In this conversation, Elizabeth Breau discusses the transition to digital testing for the ACT and SAT, expressing concerns about the impact on critical thinking and reading comprehension. She highlights the challenges students face with shorter passages and formulaic questions, and shares her teaching strategies to adapt to the new format. The discussion also touches on the importance of fostering reading habits in students and the future of standardized testing. Veteran educator Elizabeth Breau delivers a scathing critique of digital SAT changes, revealing how "factoid-style" passages have replaced meaningful reading while obsessing over colon punctuation, shares her unconventional advice to skip reading passages entirely, and explains why parents must become readers themselves if they want their children to develop genuine literacy skills.
Key Topics Covered
- The Factoid Test Problem: How digital SAT passages became meaningless three-sentence snippets with "funny looking long names" designed to distract rather than assess genuine reading comprehension skills
- The Colon Obsession Crisis: Why test makers have built a "shrine to the colon" with excessive punctuation questions that torment students while teaching skills they'll never actually need in real writing
- The Skip-Reading Strategy: The counterintuitive tutoring advice to read questions first and often ignore student notes entirely, because passages are so short that traditional reading strategies no longer work
- The College Readiness Disconnect: How formulaic test design fails to prepare students for actual college work involving full books, lengthy articles, and sustained intellectual engagement
- The Parent Reading Revolution: Why household reading culture matters more than any tutoring technique, and the specific strategies for making literature a shared family experience
Conclusion
This conversation challenges fundamental assumptions about standardized testing effectiveness while exposing how digital formats have diminished educational value. Elizabeth's frustration reflects deeper concerns about preparing students for academic work that requires sustained attention and critical thinking rather than rapid factoid recognition.
What specific strategies help students navigate meaningless test passages? How do parents model reading behavior that actually influences their children? Which traditional test prep approaches no longer work with digital formats?
Listen to the complete episode to discover Elizabeth's exact methods for "cracking the code" of formulaic digital tests, her specific recommendations for building family reading culture, and her predictions about Enhanced ACT's potential to avoid SAT's design mistakes.
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