Do you have any tips on answering open-ended questions?

I do. In a nutshell, here’s the sequence of what I do:

Teaching them How To Answer a Question (not in writing, but out loud)

1. Have the students practice answering questions about themselves, NOT about stories or written text, using the dialogue Q&A format.  Do these out loud.  Have fun with them. I do two a day (just you and a volunteer at the front of the class, in front of everyone, you using the QA1234345 script and the other person answering the questions) at the beginning of class, and don’t tell students that it’s even related to testing.

Teaching Them To Answer A Question About a Story They Already Know (they prepare it in writing so they can “perform” the dialogue out loud)

2. Have students write questions about movies they’ve all seen, using the generic question stems.

3. Have them write QA12345 scripts to answer their questions, using the dialogue format, and then act out their questions and dialogues.

Teaching Them How To Answer A Question From a Story They Just Read (they prepare it in writing so they can perform the dialogue out loud)

4. Have them write questions about stories they read, using the same generic question stems.

5. Have them write answers to these questions, and on #1 and #3, use ONLY quotations of text from the stories.

That’s what I do.  We don’t even try to make them insightful or global, just shoot for an answer with evidence.  The above will get passing scores if they just do that with the questions from the test.  In fact, for questions involving only one text, they can use QA125 and do well.  I advise all of my students to do this, NOT to write tiny little essays.  Go for a 2 and move on, saving all that energy for something else, like their composition or lunch.

Teaching Them How To Craft Their Answer Better

6. Do sentence-combining exercises.  Prepare for this by getting one of your own students’ released answers from any recent tests and breaking it down into sentence-combining exercises.

7. Hand them out and ask students to combine the sentences into stronger writing.

8. Compare answers.

9. Look at the student’s original answer together.

10. Repeat this process with another high-scoring response, readied for a sentence-combining exercise.

11. Repeat this process with a high-scoring released response.