If you are a high school teacher, a student, or the parent of one, you’re likely aware of the newest changes to the SAT, designed to make the test, among other things, more rigorous and more resistant to test prepping.

The changes to the SAT — and the arguments in support of those changes — are similar to some of the most critical changes implicit in the Common Core. Those changes focus on better preparing students for college by requiring them to read and make sense of harder texts, incorporating more nonfiction and “actively practicing” vocabulary.

It’s important to balance these new areas of emphasis with long-standing best practices in literacy instruction. There are a few steps that educators, parents and students need to follow to best prepare for the new SAT.

Read more complex texts

The new test is reading intensive, featuring long passages of difficult primary source material. Each version will pull at least one passage from the founding documents of the United States — the Declaration of Independence, or the Federalist Papers — or from key sources for or reflections on those documents. Students must answer questions more directly derived from those texts. You don’t just need to know the definition of a word; you need to know how it functions in the third paragraph of one of those documents.

Reading harder texts and, especially, reading texts written in the language of bygone era is challenging. The distance between the way we speak today and the language of Darwin, DuBois, Locke, and Madison grows wider each year. Students need practice reading and internalizing the cadence and syntax of what we call “archaic” text.

Systematic exposure to older texts matters beyond preparing for the SAT. How do you sustain democracy in a culture where the majority of citizens can’t read its founding documents?

The importance of nonfiction

The redesigned SAT draws more heavily from nonfiction, with extensive cross-disciplinary reading from the sciences, social sciences, and history. The rationale is that beyond high school students must glean knowledge from the articles, essays, and research summaries of their chosen field to succeed.

This requires lots of reading, not just in English classes, but in Biology and Math and History, where students should practice learning from the written discourse of the field. Teachers (or parents) can also broaden the familiarity students have with different forms of nonfiction, through a method we call embedding — the process of pairing nonfiction texts with a novel or memoir in strategic ways.

For example, in beginning the “Diary of Anne Frank” teachers might assign for background an article on World War II or the rise of the Nazis. But embedding would take this idea further both in extent and in range of topics — a teacher might embed 10 articles at various points, not only to provide historical background but to cause students to read about, say, the psychology of captivity or the history of the diary as a form of writing.

“Actively Practice” vocabulary

The SAT of old was as a bastion of words falling out of common discourse. Test-takers encountered questions like, “which word is the best synonym for vituperative?” The new SAT studies vocabulary as it functions in a specific setting, often in a text: “Maintain” used to mean to argue for one’s opinion as it appears in the opening page of To Kill a Mockingbird. This means a different approach to teaching — one that is not as simple as having students practice using context clues to figure out the meaning of an unknown word.

Teachers need another tool.

“Active practice” means instead of spending time guessing at word meanings, providing a simple high quality definition and asking students to play with (and problem solve with) the word. A teacher might say “to be destitute is to be without the necessities of life” and then ask, “What might cause a wealthy person to become destitute?” “Could you be destitute even if you had money?” In each case she would ask students to use destitute or a form of it in their answer.

Literary researcher Tim Shanahan has noted that a student needs to use a word about 15 times to really own it. This process, more than memorizing a definition or guessing from context, gives students iterations with a word and much practice watching its shades of meaning change.

No matter how you might feel about the specific changes to the SAT — or about standardized testing in general — it’s pretty tough to argue against the ultimate long-term value of working with students to read complex texts, exposing students to a variety of written formats and pushing students to expand their vocabulary.

And this is really what we’re talking about.

Doug Lemov (with co-authors Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway) is the author of Reading Reconsidered: A Practical Guide to Rigorous Literacy.