McGraw-Hill's Praxis I & II Exam (McGraw-Hill's Praxis I & II)

Each year nearly 700,000 prospective teachers nationwide take the Professional Assessment for Beginning Teachers, or Praxis battery, produced by ETS.

Although there are minor variations from state to state, 43 states now require public school teachers to be tested for competency in basic skills like reading, writing, teaching, and subject matter proficiency, as part of the licensing process. The preferred testing instrument among 35 of those states is the Praxis series.

Written by a test designer and reader at ETS, McGraw-Hill's Praxis I & II is a complete insider's guide, offering a full-spectrum preparation for the two most important sections of the Praxis-- Praxis I: Academic Skills Assessment and Praxis II: Subject Assessments.

REVIEW for ARCO Preparation for the Praxis II Exam, 18th edition .......2006-02-16

REA … Real review, Real practice, Real results.

Take your teaching career to the head of the class.

PRAXIS PLT K-6, 2nd Edition with TESTware
Includes CD with timed practice tests, instant scoring, and more.
For Teacher Certification

Are you prepared to excel on the PRAXIS?
* Get to know the test, how it is scored, and much more.
* Set up a study schedule by following our flexible, results-driven timeline
* Take one of the practice tests to discover what you know and what you should know
* Use REA's advice to ready yourself for proper study and success

Sharpen your knowledge and skills
* The book's comprehensive review features coverage of all topics on the official exam, including students as learners, instruction and assessment, communication techniques, and teacher professionalism
* Lessons reinforce necessary skills
* Key tutorials enhance specific abilities needed on the test
* Targeted drills increase comprehension and help organize study

Practice for real
* Create the closest experience to test-day conditions with two of the book’s four full-length practice tests on REA’s TESTware CD, featuring test-taking against the clock, instant scoring by topic, handy mark-and-return function, pause function, and more
* OR choose paper-and-pencil testing at your own pace
* Chart your progress with full and detailed explanations of all answers
* Boost your confidence with test-taking strategies and experienced advice

Get to the head of the class! Get certified!

REA books and software have proven to be the extra support teacher candidates need to pass their challenging test for state licensure. Our comprehensive study guides are teacher-recommended and written by educators who have mastered the test and the related program of study.

REA … Real review, Real practice, Real results.

Take your teaching career to the head of the class.

PRAXIS PLT 7-12, 2nd EDITION with TESTware
Includes CD with timed practice tests, instant scoring, and more.
For Teacher Certification

Are you prepared to excel on the PRAXIS?
* Get to know the test, how it is scored, and much more.
* Set up a study schedule by following our flexible, results-driven timeline
* Take one of the practice tests to discover what you know and what you should know
* Use REA's advice to ready yourself for proper study and success

Sharpen your knowledge and skills
* The book's comprehensive review features coverage of all exam subject matter, including students as learners, instruction and assessment, communication techniques, and teacher professionalism
* Lessons reinforce necessary skills
* Key tutorials enhance specific abilities needed on the test
* Targeted drills increase comprehension and help organize study

Practice for real
* Create the closest experience to test-day conditions with two full-length practice tests on REA’s TESTware CD, featuring test-taking against the clock, instant scoring by topic, handy mark-and-return function, pause function, and more
* OR choose paper-and-pencil testing at your own pace
* Chart your progress with full and detailed explanations of all answers
* Boost your confidence with test-taking strategies and experienced advice

Get to the head of the class! Get certified!

REA books and software have proven to be the extra support teacher candidates need to pass their challenging test for state licensure. Our comprehensive study guides are teacher-recommended and written by educators who have mastered the test and the related program of study.

The majority of XAM study guides have 125 question multiple choice sample tests. the questions are medium to hard in difficulty but reasonable for a trained teacher candidate to answer. Since the questions do highly resemble the real test we are frequently asked if they are formker tests. They are not. If any question from our book appears on the test it would be a coincidence.

XAM Publishing, Inc. has e-mail support at winwin1111@aol.com. XAM staff welcomes your updates and values your input. Each year a new version of the study guide is released so you may have the best in educational research.

I haven't bothered to read all of the sections in the "Familiarity with Hispanic Culture" section, because the little bit I have read has factual errors. Spain is not divided into "15 regions," and even if it were, these "15 regions" are listed as "the north," "the central region," "the south" and "the east", due to a poorly constructed paragraph - that's still only four "regions". If you can ignore the faulty syntax, you could then learn the names of 14 of the "regions" of Spain, which is still not quite right, since Spain is divided into 50 provinces each of which is within one of 17 autonomous communities. The authors left out Asturias, las Islas Baleares and las Islas Canarias, and additionally collapsed two communities, Castilla-La Mancha and Castilla y León, into a new one, Castilla.

Other errors can be found in the "Grammar and Maps" reference section. For example, it came as a great surprise to me that the 3rd pers. sing future of poder was podrpa and the past participles of escribir and poner are ecrito and puseto, respectively. Although these are most likely "just typos", there was apparently no attempt to edit this book at all.

I also found the few maps and images to ve of very poor quality, and in fact they seem to be nothing more than cheap clip art or copies of images from different web pages. I found the map of Spain that is used in this book on a mail-order bride website and the same fuzzy graphic of Spanish pesetas on a high school student's webpage; where these pictures originally appeared is anybody's guess, since there is no citation in the XAM book or on the other webpages.

Actually, it wasn't just the bad graphic of the Spanish pesetas that caught my attention. The image appears on a page entitled "Money from Spanish-speaking Countries". That poor-quality picture and a list of some out-of-date conversion equivalents in US dollars of the coins and bill shown are all that the XAM authors had to say about money in the Spanish-speaking world. No mention of any other currencies like the peso, quetzal, sol or bolivar, just to name a few. And in a book which has a 2004 copyright date, don't you think they might have mentioned the transition to the Euro in Spain?

The section I was most interested in was the practice test. Unfortunately, and especially after losing confidence in the prep book as a whole after looking through the review and reference pages, I found it to be a great disappointment. There were, of course, many more typos (which is quite ironic, since a great number of questions deal with the test taker's ability to determine whether or not an accent has been used incorrectly or perhaps left out) which left me thinking, perhaps the best preparation this book had to offer was all of the time I spent viewing it with a critical eye to find the mistakes. Too bad. I was really hoping to have found a nice preparation tool for my upcoming Praxis II Exam, but this is, without a doubt, the worst test preparation tool I have ever seen.