PEI EMA Grade 6 common mistakes
PEI EMA Grade 6 · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Chooses a multiple-choice answer because it repeats a word or phrase from the passage, even when the surrounding sentence contradicts that choice.
The student scans for matching vocabulary instead of constructing meaning from the whole sentence or paragraph; test distractors often recycle passage words, so word-matching feels productive.
What to do instead
Require an evidence sandwich for every answer: quote the exact sentence, explain how it supports the choice, and eliminate any option that only echoes vocabulary without matching the meaning. Practise with deliberately word-repeating distractors.
Answers inference questions with a personal opinion or prior knowledge rather than with clues from the text.
Inference feels like guessing to Grade 6 readers, and students have not learned to combine textual evidence with background knowledge in a controlled way.
What to do instead
Use a three-column inference chart: what the text says, what I already know, and therefore what I can infer. Require a line reference for each inference and contrast explicit questions with implied questions using short passages.
Begins writing a full draft without planning and produces a response that drifts off the prompt or lacks a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Students see planning as lost writing time, and prompts with several parts make it easy to answer only the first part or to follow an unrelated idea.
What to do instead
Teach a three-minute planning box: audience, purpose, form, and three key points. Underline task words in the prompt, reread the plan before drafting, and use a brief checklist to confirm every part of the prompt is addressed.
Writes a first draft and submits it without revising for sentence variety, precise word choice, or paragraph organization.
Students conflate drafting with editing and stop when ideas are on the page; they also lack specific revision moves beyond correcting spelling.
What to do instead
Separate drafting from revising with a structured revision pass: vary sentence beginnings, combine short sentences, replace weak verbs and general nouns, and check that each paragraph has one clear focus. Read the draft aloud to hear repetition and run-ons.
During a group discussion, states a personal idea and then waits silently or changes topic instead of responding to or building on the previous speaker.
Students treat discussion as taking turns rather than constructing shared meaning; without sentence frames, they do not know how to disagree politely or extend an idea.
What to do instead
Teach accountable-talk stems such as “I agree with ___ because ___,” “Adding to what ___ said,” and “I see it differently because ___.” Require each student to paraphrase the previous speaker before contributing, and use short, structured discussion roles.
Lines up digits incorrectly in multi-digit multiplication or division, or places the decimal point in the wrong position when computing with decimals.
The student treats decimal numerals as whole numbers and has memorized algorithms without place-value meaning; estimation is skipped, so an unreasonable answer goes unnoticed.
What to do instead
Estimate before computing, use place-value charts or grid paper to align digits, and place the decimal point by checking reasonableness against the estimate. Verify with the inverse operation and require a written estimate-plus-answer pair.
Reports the remainder from a division word problem as the final answer without deciding whether the context requires rounding up, dropping the remainder, or expressing it as a fraction or decimal.
Division is practised mostly as exact computation, so students treat the remainder as a number to write down rather than as information whose meaning depends on the situation.
What to do instead
Classify remainder problems before solving: Does the context need another whole group, only complete groups, or a fractional amount? Write the final answer in a sentence with units, compare it with an estimate, and explain what the remainder represents.
Extends a number pattern by repeatedly adding the same amount when the actual rule uses two operations, alternating changes, or a multiplicative relationship.
Students overgeneralize constant-difference patterns from earlier grades and do not test a candidate rule against several terms or organize the pattern in a table.
What to do instead
Build a table of term number and term value, examine first and second differences, and state the rule in words before writing it symbolically. Test the rule on the next two terms and, where appropriate, graph the pairs to see whether the relationship is linear.
Confuses area and perimeter, using a perimeter formula to calculate area or reporting perimeter in square units.
Both measurements involve the dimensions of a shape, and formulas are often memorized without connecting perimeter to distance around and area to surface covered.
What to do instead
Use hands-on models: perimeter as fencing around a garden, area as the number of unit squares covering it. Label every answer with the correct unit, count squares on grid paper, and compare rectangles with the same perimeter but different areas.
Calculates the mean by dividing by the wrong number of data values, or reports the mean as the best description of a data set that contains a clear outlier; writes probability as an unsimplified ratio.
The student focuses on the arithmetic procedure, miscounts the data set, and has not discussed how outliers affect measures of centre; probability is treated as a count rather than a ratio out of all outcomes.
What to do instead
Count and list the data values before dividing, and use the language “sum divided by the number of values.” Compare mean and median on sets with and without outliers, and write probabilities as a simplified fraction, decimal, and percent with likelihood words.