How to run a full OSSLT practice test with your class

Why a full sitting is worth two periods

A full practice test tells you more about a class than any other single activity. It shows which reading skills hold up across four kinds of text, which writing questions trip students up, and how they handle the two written answers when the clock is running.

It works best at two points in a four to five month plan: once at the start, to find out where students begin, and once near the end, to check what moved. Teaching the OSSLT lays out the months in between.

The OSSLT has two sessions. EQAO designs Session A to take about 65 minutes and Session B about 75, and schools can run them back to back with a short break or on two different days. A class practice sitting can follow the same shape, so most teachers book two periods.

Two ways to run it

There are two good options, and they do different jobs.

EQAO's practice test

EQAO's own practice test runs on the same online platform as the real OSSLT, with the same tools and question types, including drag and drop and drop-down menus. Students can take it from EQAO's website, and EQAO's framework notes that teachers can also organize a practice session through the e-assessment system. When students finish, they see the correct responses, the scoring rubrics and sample answers for the written parts.

Use it at least once, so the platform is familiar on test day. Its written answers are not scored for you, though, so you still have a class set of short answers and essays to read and code.

A Litguide class link

Litguide's online OSSLT practice test is a full-length practice test in the style of the OSSLT: two parts that mirror Session A and Session B, 37 questions, four reading selections, 12 writing questions, a short answer and an opinion essay. Every question is marked when a student finishes, including the two written answers, and with a class link you see the whole class on one page.

It is original Litguide material, not EQAO questions, and Litguide is independent of EQAO. Its question types are single and multiple selection, so pair it with EQAO's practice test for the drag and drop and drop-down formats.

Setting up a class link

It takes about two minutes.

• Open the online practice test and choose Get a class link in the section for teachers.

• Enter your name, your board email address, your school and, if you like, a class name. Use your board address: personal email addresses are not accepted.

• The student link and your private results link are sent to that address.

• Share the student link however you share links with your class.

Students open the link and type a first name and last initial. There are no student accounts and no student emails. Each link holds up to 200 results, results are kept for 120 days, and you can delete any of them at any time.

Planning the sitting

A few decisions make the sitting run like the real thing.

• Book two periods, one for each part, or one long block with a break between them.

• Have students use the same device and browser for both parts. Answers are saved in the browser as they go, which is what lets a student stop after Part 1 and come back for Part 2.

• Turn the timer on for test conditions. It is in the Accessibility menu and gives 65 minutes for Part 1 and 75 for Part 2. Leave it off for a first, untimed run if your class is new to the format.

• Show students the Accessibility menu before they start: text size up to 150%, high contrast and full screen.

• Remind them that pasting is turned off in the two writing questions, so the short answer and the essay have to be typed in the box.

• Give them a pace to aim for: about two minutes a question, ten minutes for the short answer and about 35 for the essay, which leaves time to review.

If a student has an Individual Education Plan with assistive technology, have them practise with it on EQAO's practice test too, since the real platform has its own tools, such as text-to-speech.

Reading the results

Results arrive on your results page as students finish Part 2, and new ones can take a minute to appear. The class table shows, for each student:

• how many of the 23 reading questions and the 12 writing questions they answered correctly;

• the code for the short answer, and both codes for the opinion essay, topic development and conventions;

• an overall level on Litguide's four levels.

Open any student to see every answer and both written pieces in full, with the skills to work on. Once three students have finished, the page also shows the five questions the fewest students answered correctly. You can download the class as a spreadsheet, with a level for reading, writing and the essay, and the page is laid out to work on a projector.

The levels are a practice estimate, not an OSSLT score. EQAO reports a scale score from 200 to 400 that a practice test cannot predict, so treat the results as a map of skills, not a forecast of who will pass.

Turning results into teaching

The results are most useful when you group students by the skills they missed rather than by their totals. Three groups cover most classes:

• students who miss inference questions, the ones that ask what a detail suggests;

• students whose written answers are on the right track but lack specific details from the text;

• students whose errors in conventions distract from what they are saying.

Start with the five most missed questions: go through one or two with the whole class and ask what the question was really asking. Then project an anonymous short answer and essay and code them together with EQAO's rubrics. The OSSLT short answer and OSSLT opinion essay examples have samples at every code to compare against.

For the second sitting near the end of the plan, use a different form, such as EQAO's practice test or the printable OSSLT practice test PDF, so the check measures the skills and not memory of the same questions.

When you want this all term

A class link gives you one marked sitting. If you want the same marking every week, with lessons released one at a time and every attempt tracked by student and by skill, that is what Litguide does for schools. Request a classroom and we set it up.