Praxis Principles of Learning and Teaching: Grades 7-12 (5624)
Praxis Principles of Learning and Teaching: Grades 7-12 (5624) is a trademark of its owner, which is not affiliated with and does not endorse Test Treasure Publication or TTP Prep.
Praxis Principles of Learning and Teaching: Grades 7-12 (5624) is a trademark of its owner, which is not affiliated with and does not endorse Test Treasure Publication or TTP Prep.
10 sample questions for the Praxis Principles of Learning and Teaching: Grades 7-12 (5624), with the correct answer and an explanation for each. No account needed. Try each one before you open the answer.
Sections covered on the exam: Students as Learners, Instructional Process, Professional Development, Leadership, and Community.
Question 1 · Students as Learners
In a grade 9 physical science class, Keisha predicts that a 2-kilogram ball will hit the floor well before a 1-kilogram ball dropped from the same height. After several trials in which the balls land at nearly the same moment, she says, "So the mass doesn't make it fall faster. I need to rethink what I believed about falling." In her lab journal she writes a new rule and uses it to predict how a heavy and a light toy car will move after rolling off a ramp.
Answer: D. Accommodation of an existing schema after disequilibrium
Keisha's belief could not explain the evidence, which produced disequilibrium, and she revised her schema to fit the data, which is accommodation. Assimilation would mean fitting the result into her old belief without changing it. Conservation and reversibility are concrete operational abilities, not the mechanism of schema change.
Question 2 · Students as Learners
Through a student interest survey, a grade 9 business and marketing teacher learns that several students regularly help at family-owned food trucks, a nail salon and a landscaping business.
Answer: B. Using students' family business experience as case material for a unit on pricing and costs
Funds of knowledge are the skills and knowledge students gain from their households and communities, and applying the concept means using that knowledge as an academic resource. The grouping option treats the students' family work as a deficit. A celebration day is a surface-level cultural activity that does not connect the students' expertise to course content.
Question 3 · Instructional Process
A grade 11 physics teacher begins a lesson by writing Newton's second law (net force equals mass times acceleration) on the board and explaining each variable. Students then work in pairs to calculate the acceleration of carts of different masses pulled by the same spring scale force, and they check their calculations by timing the carts down a track.
Answer: B. It is deductive, because students apply a general principle that was given to specific cases
The lesson starts with the general law and has students apply it to particular carts, which is deductive reasoning. An inductive lesson would have students gather data first and generate the rule themselves. Working in pairs or doing a lab does not make a lesson inductive; what matters is whether the rule comes first or last.
Question 4 · Students as Learners
Midway through a unit on Reconstruction, a grade 11 United States history teacher gives an eight-question quiz on the goals of different groups after the Civil War. She enters the scores in the gradebook with a weight of zero, sorts students into three groups according to which groups' goals they confused, and plans station activities for the next class based on those groups.
Answer: A. Formative assessment, because the results are used to adjust instruction while learning is under way
An assessment's type depends on how its results are used. The teacher gives the quiz during the unit and uses the results to regroup students and plan the next lesson, which is formative use. Diagnostic assessment usually happens before instruction to identify prerequisite gaps, and recording a score with zero weight does not make the quiz summative.
Question 5 · Professional Development, Leadership, and Community
The four Algebra I teachers at a high school meet every Wednesday. This week each teacher brings scored copies of the same six-question quiz on systems of equations. They sort the results and find that 31 students across their sections could solve systems algebraically but could not set up a system from a word problem. They spend the rest of the meeting designing a 20-minute small-group lesson on translating word problems, to be taught during the school's intervention period.
Answer: B. How will we respond when some students do not learn it?
After using the common quiz as evidence, the team plans reteaching for the students who missed the word-problem target, which is the question about responding when students do not learn. The quiz itself answered the question about how the team will know whether students learned, but the planning in the second half of the meeting is a response to that evidence. Nothing in the scenario involves enrichment for proficient students.
Question 6 · Students as Learners
Students in a grade 11 environmental science class are concerned about litter in a creek behind the school. Their teacher organizes a unit in which students collect and classify trash samples, test water quality, interview a city official and present a cleanup proposal to the school board. Each week, students write reflections connecting what they did to concepts from class.
Answer: C. Dewey, through experiential learning with reflection on a real problem
Dewey emphasized learning through genuine experience combined with reflection, with the school acting as a democratic community that addresses real problems. The unit centers on a real local issue, active investigation, civic participation and weekly reflection. Nothing in the scenario relies on reinforcement schedules, observational modeling or a stage progression.
Question 7 · Students as Learners
An instructional coach observes a grade 10 English class. With students the teacher considers high performing, she waits about four seconds after asking a question, rephrases and prompts when they hesitate, and asks analysis questions. With students she considers low performing, she waits about one second, moves on quickly and asks mostly recall questions.
Answer: D. A self-fulfilling teacher expectation effect
Teachers communicate expectations through behaviors such as wait time, prompting and question level, and differential treatment can make expectations self-fulfilling, as in the Pygmalion effect. Stereotype threat is the student's fear of confirming a group stereotype, not a teacher's differential treatment. No rewards or repeated uncontrollable failures are described.
Question 8 · Instructional Process
In a grade 8 English class, many students label every comparison in a poem as a metaphor, including lines such as "Her laugh was like a bell" and "The wind howled through the trees." The teacher wants students to understand exactly what makes a metaphor a metaphor.
Answer: C. Presenting metaphors alongside similes and personification and asking what separates them
Close non-examples, such as similes and personification, show the boundary of a concept and the defining attribute that separates it from related ideas. More examples alone do not show students what falls outside the concept. Memorizing a definition and writing metaphors do not confront the confusion with similar devices.
Question 9 · Students as Learners
In a grade 11 chemistry course, each student keeps a learning log listing the unit's targets. After every lab, students rate their progress on each target, compare their lab work with posted exemplars and write a goal and a study strategy for the next lab. The teacher does not collect the logs; students use them to decide what to review.
Answer: C. Assessment as learning, because students monitor and regulate their own progress
Assessment as learning puts students in the role of assessor: they compare work with criteria, set goals and adjust strategies, which builds metacognition and self-regulation. The teacher does not use the logs to plan instruction, so this is not assessment for learning, and the ratings follow each lab rather than serving as a final record or a pre-assessment.
Question 10 · Professional Development, Leadership, and Community
A first-year middle school math teacher and an instructional coach agree on a goal: increase the number of students who explain their reasoning aloud. The coach first teaches a lesson in the teacher's class showing how she uses 'talk moves' such as revoicing and asking students to add on. The next week the teacher leads a lesson using the moves while the coach records how many students explain their thinking. They meet the same afternoon to review the data and plan the next lesson.
Answer: C. It is job-embedded, with modeling, observation and feedback in the teacher's own classroom
The coaching cycle described, which includes goal setting, modeling, observation with data and debriefing with the teacher's own students, is job-embedded and sustained, the features most associated with changes in practice. A workshop can also be expert-led and introduce a research-based strategy, so those features do not distinguish the two. Instructional coaching is generally kept separate from formal evaluation.
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