Sample Questions: Introduction to Educational Psychology

The following Introduction to Educational Psychology sample questions aren't used in actual CLEP exams and aren’t presented here as they will be on the test. Use them to get a sense of question format and difficulty level.

Directions

Each of the questions or incomplete statements below is followed by five suggested answers or completions. Select the one that is best in each case.

Questions

1. A teacher who wants to foster moral development in accordance with Lawrence Kohlberg’s scheme would be most likely to
   1. provide students with social service internships
   2. provide opportunities for students to discuss
   3. group students according to the same level of moral development
   4. group students according to mixed levels of moral development
   5. group students by gender in order to acknowledge their differences in moral development
2. Mr. Janoff, a social studies teacher, sometimes has students who request copies of his notes or slides from class. He explains that it is better for students to take the notes themselves. Taking notes helps students improve their
   1. retrieval
   2. bottom-up processing
   3. encoding
   4. use of the keyword strategy
   5. use of mnemonics
3. Professor Wong is known for giving unscheduled quizzes in his class. Some weeks he gives three quizzes. Then he will go two weeks with no quiz. What schedule of reinforcement is Professor Wong using?
   1. Fixed ratio
   2. Variable ratio
   3. Continuous
   4. Variable interval
   5. Fixed interval
4. Ms. Janeway has developed a unit on career exploration for her high school sophomores. A student in her class says he is sure he wants to be a dentist like his father and sees no reason to consider other possibilities. How would James Marcia describe the student’s identity status?
   1. Identity diffusion
   2. Identity foreclosure
   3. Identity moratorium
   4. Identity confusion
   5. Identity achievement
5. Which of the following examples best illustrates intrinsic motivation?
   1. Lois competes for a prize every summer by trying to read more novels than anybody else in her group.
   2. Patti studies chess moves because she wants to join the chess team.
   3. Bill has found that he makes new friends when he walks his dog in the park.
   4. Evan has learned tailoring so that he can get a high-paying job in the fashion industry.
   5. Barbara has read all the best-known Russian novelists because she finds their philosophies engaging
6. According to Howard Gardner, an Olympic gymnast most likely possesses a very high level of which type of intelligence?
   1. Spatial
   2. Linguistic
   3. Intrapersonal
   4. Kinesthetic
   5. Naturalist
7. The biology department at a high school developed an achievement test that measures science and math skills. The test is used to determine who gets into the advanced biology class, which can accommodate only 20 students. What type of validity is the most important for this test?
   1. Face
   2. Content
   3. Construct
   4. Predictive
   5. Convergent
8. A teacher asks a student to compare and contrast the causes of a war. The teacher is prompting thinking at which of the following levels of Bloom’s taxonomy?
   1. Analysis
   2. Comprehension
   3. Synthesis
   4. Application
   5. Understanding
9. Which of the following illustrates a correlation?
   1. Ms. Forte notices that Amanda never has her homework completed on Mondays.
   2. Ms. Gould notices that students in her morning class usually share more insights than those in her afternoon class.
   3. Ms. Ortiz notices that the more library books students check out, the higher their grades.
   4. Ms. Keutz notices that the boys in her class usually start packing up five minutes before the end of her class, but this is not the case in Ms. Hamilton’s class.
   5. Ms. Jones notices that Asta has finally become interested in reading Shakespeare.
10. In order to illustrate how often a particular score occurs in a given data set, researchers use
    1. inferential techniques
    2. cognitive mapping
    3. cluster analysis
    4. the median
    5. a frequency distribution

Answers

1) B   2) C   3) D   4) B   5) E   6) D   7) D   8) A   9) C   10) E