PERT Reading: College Readiness Test Preparation
Why This Learning Experience?
This self-paced professional learning experience is designed by an experienced educator to help you learn on your own schedule. Participants complete practical activities, connect ideas to real classroom practice, and build confidence through application-focused learning — with instant, auto-graded feedback along the way.
Learning Experience Overview
PERT Reading is a comprehensive, self-paced test-preparation course designed to strengthen the reading and reasoning skills associated with Florida’s Postsecondary Education Readiness Test (PERT).
The course covers all ten reading skills identified by the Florida Department of Education across six carefully sequenced lessons. Learners develop strategies for identifying main ideas and supporting details, determining vocabulary in context, understanding relationships within and between sentences, analyzing text structure, interpreting author’s purpose and tone, distinguishing fact from opinion, evaluating arguments, making evidence-based inferences about people, and comparing two texts.
Rather than relying on memorization or simply providing banks of practice questions, the course emphasizes close reading, textual evidence, and reasoning. Learners work with original passages written specifically for the course and study fully worked examples that explain not only why the correct answer works, but why the other choices do not.
Learning Outcomes
- Identify the main idea of a passage and distinguish it from the topic and individual supporting details.
- Summarize important ideas, events, and information while separating essential reasoning from examples and less important details.
- Determine whether information supports, strengthens, weakens, or is unrelated to an assertion about a text.
- Determine the meaning of words and phrases in context using textual clues, multiple meanings, connotation, intensity, and figurative language.
- Recognize logical relationships within and between sentences, including transitions, pronoun references, modifiers, and negation.
- Identify common organizational structures and explain how individual sentences and paragraphs contribute to a passage.
- Determine an author’s purpose and analyze tone, attitude, connotation, and word choice using textual evidence.
- Distinguish between fact and opinion based on verifiability.
- Evaluate an argument by identifying its claim, evidence, reasoning, assumptions, and rhetorical choices.
- Make evidence-based inferences about a person’s traits, motivations, thoughts, and perspective.
- Identify point of view and recognize how perspective affects what a reader knows.
- Compare two texts addressing a similar topic by examining their claims, perspectives, emphasis, scope, tone, and purpose.
Who Should Participate?
PERT Reading is designed for learners who want structured preparation for the reading and reasoning skills associated with the PERT, including:
- High school students preparing for college-readiness or placement testing.
- Adult learners returning to college after time away from academic reading.
- Students who want additional preparation before taking or retaking PERT Reading.
- Learners who can read independently but want practice interpreting dense academic passages and understanding how placement-test questions are constructed.
- Students who want to strengthen evidence-based reading skills before beginning college coursework.
The course is particularly appropriate for learners who find themselves choosing answers that seem reasonable but are not actually supported by the passage. A major emphasis throughout the course is learning to distinguish between what is true or plausible and what the text actually supports.
