What is 11 Plus Verbal Reasoning?

The verbal reasoning test for 11 plus will examine your child’s ability to process, identify, evaluate and manipulate information. The test itself will explore these concepts using different techniques and question formats. By measuring your child’s critical thinking skills, can grammar schools better measure your child’s academic competency and potential.

This may sound scary, but it isn’t anywhere as daunting as you think and nearly every child excels in one area and needs improvement in others. Here is a break down of the core verbal reasoning test areas including key questions you need to ask yourself your child’s ability:

• Processing Information : This is seen as a fundamental / basic skill and questions that fall in this area will measure your child’s ability to read a piece of factual or non-factual information. After this, they will be tested on how much information they understood and remembered accurately.
• Identify : Similar to the processing of information, your child will be required to recognise patterns, themes, relationships and more. Not only will they need to be able to process the information, they have to see the different elements of that information and how those things come together.
• Evaluate : Your child would be expected to showcase some evaluation skills. What this means is that they should be able to process and identify the information given to them, and through their own reasoning form an opinion or idea. This is a very crucial skillset in the childs arsenal and not something that is learnt overnight. You should allow your child to openly think and give opinion on information that they’re given on a day to day basis, again, when it comes to identification this would help them recognise patterns and themes.
• Manipulate : Not only would your child receive information and have to extract its basic elements as well as ideas or opinions from it, they need to have both the skills and confidence to change the information. Whether that is rewording a sentence, replacing a word to change the meaning or seeing it from a different point of view, they need to be comfortable in interpreting information in their own way.

The points mentioned above are systematic, its important to make sure your child first a firm grounding in process and identify before they try to evaluate and manipulate. These critical thinking skills can be learnt and developed but they need the time, focus and opportunity to do so. Bear in mind that no child starts from zero, your child may be strong in identify and manipulate, but slightly struggle in evaluation.

What you need to do is recognise it early and support them.

Can you improve verbal reasoning?

Verbal reasoning can absolutely be improved if the child gets into a steady routine of reading, studying, questioning and solving word problems. Its important to understand that the development of their ability comes with time, exposure and validation. The less time they spend doing, the less they will be confident but on the other hand give them too much and you will burn them out. Get them into a happy balanced routine that gives different exercises so you make sure their interest isn’t always dropping or waning.

See what challenges them and balance those activities with those which top-up their existing skills and confidence, the most important thing you can do is to support them when they’re struggling and be happy when they get something right.

Always keep in mind that these are skills, not talent, so critical thinking or verbal reasoning skills can always be learned. You want to equip your child with tools to feel confident enough to apply the techniques they have learnt even to a question they haven’t studied, so focus on the techniques. Here are a few examples of activities you can do:

• Word games and quizzes build the ability to recall, match and identify similar or different pairs of words
• Crosswords and word searches build the ability to recognise and identify based on meaning, so your child can categorise and label definitions better, relying on their knowledge to understand what is relevant and what is not
• Word challenges would literally challenge your child’s knowledge and understanding whilst also exposing them to words and concepts they aren’t aware of, helping them learn on the go. With things like homophones it would help to build your child’s sense of context and background, and use that knowledge to then help them solve the problem
• By taking your child out of their bubble and helping them to experience new activities, concepts and cultures would not only expand their awareness of the world but also help them to attribute patterns and behaviours through food, colour, language etc. This ability to recognise patterns ultimately builds their evaluative skills, especially when applied to general knowledge, which can then help you to prompt them for their opinion

Do not feel that you are incapable or incompetent (which is a common thing that parents go through), remember you went through a process to get to your level of understanding ad knowledge today. Similarly, all you need to do is support your child in their process and you will watch them flourish. Remember, you are investing in their future through the skills you teach them so this will always pay itself off.

21 Verbal Reasoning Question Types

We have gone through what verbal reasoning is and whether you can really change your child’s verbal reasoning skills (in short you can!), the only thing left to get you started is to know the different types of verbal reasoning questions.

They, very politely, fall into 21 to 26 different areas, and if you want your child to get the best they can in their 11 Plus Verbal Reasoning test, you want to become laser-focussed in these areas. This is where you take all of the techniques, all of the day to day learning and growth of your child and funnel it into consistently, confidently answering these questions, and you do this through practise. Your child will have the skills to answer these questions, they aren’t used to them yet, so you need to give it time.

To recap, you want to first build their thinking and evaluation skills through learning, awareness, prompting and correction, then you want to take those skills and focus them so they are equipped in answering the following 11 Plus Verbal Reasoning question types: