HSPT Reading Help

If your child is in the eighth grade and is planning to attend a private high school, then they may be required to take the nationally recognized standardized High School Placement Test, or HSPT. Private schools across the country require incoming students to take the test in order to determine admissions, proper course placement, or scholarship qualifications. Some private schools use your child’s HSPT scores to determine all three of these factors, reinforcing the importance of your child’s best performance. The test is comprised of verbal, quantitative, mathematics, language, and reading sections. If your child is not a strong reader, there may be a lot of anxiety surrounding the reading section of the HSPT. Sufficient test preparation will reduce anxiety, build confidence, and overall improve your child’s test performance. Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools are free online HSPT study guide resources that are easy to use and self-study oriented. Learn by Concept is one of the Learning Tools that is exceptional. Learn by Concept allows your child to quickly assess their strengths and weaknesses, providing a quality High School Placement Test review.

The reading section of the HSPT will present your child with over 60 questions to be answered within a 25 minute time frame. The purpose of the reading section of the test is to test your child’s ability to understand the details and central meanings of different reading passages. Learn by Concept is designed to help strengthen your child’s skills in two main categories: Comprehension and Vocabulary. With a tiered structure that includes concept-specific subtopics, this Learning Tool helps your child focus on the areas of study in which they need the most improvement. For example, within the Comprehension section of the tool, your student can study a broad selection of content in Critical Comprehension, or they can select a more specific concept, like how to find the implied characteristics of a passage.

Once your child selects a category in which they’d like to practice, a set of HSPT Reading sample questions will be presented one at a time. They are formatted to simulate the actual High School Placement Test. Five multiple-choice answers are provided from which to choose, and once your child selects an answer, they will see the correct answer. The answer page also includes a detailed explanation of the concepts required to get to the correct answer. The answers are randomly assigned with each new viewing of the concept, securing a valid learning experience and denying the possibility of automatically memorizing the answers by placement.

In addition to Learn by Concept, Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools include online Flashcards, a Question of the Day, and Practice Tests. Online Flashcards and the Question of the Day are fun and interactive ways to fit some HSPT Reading study time into your child’s day. The Full-Length Practice Tests allow for a virtual experience of the actual test with timed and scored assessments, allowing your child to get an accurate idea of their progress. The Practice Tests and the Online Flashcards are organized like Learn by Concept, as they also present a multi-tiered concept structure. By using all of the Learning Tools together, your child can develop a personalized HSPT Reading study plan to follow as they progress toward test day.