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Study Guide

Field 072: Family and Consumer Sciences

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Sample Selected-Response Questions

Competency 0001 
Nutrition, Food, and Wellness

1. In an introductory lesson on understanding food labels, students bring in wrappers from favorite snack foods to analyze and evaluate how they fit into a healthy diet. One student says, "The label on this bag of cookies says there are only 90 Calories per serving! I thought it would be more than that!" Which question should the teacher ask  start italics first end italics  to help the student further evaluate the information on the food label?

  1. Can you calculate how many Calories from carbohydrates are in a serving?
  2. How big is a serving and how many servings are in the bag?
  3. What foods do you recognize in the list of ingredients?
  4. How many of the nutrients listed are at or close to the daily value requirements?
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Correct Response: B. This item requires examinees to demonstrate understanding of the types of information required on food packaging and evaluate nutritional information on food labels. The Calorie content of any food is relative to the size of a serving, and serving sizes may vary among different packages of similar products. To accurately assess the Calorie content of food, a consumer must know the size of a serving and/or the number of servings in the container as well as the number of Calories per serving. Consumers must be aware that Calorie counts based on small serving sizes may create a false impression of low Calories. The consumer can then calculate the amount of the food that can be eaten to consume a specific number of Calories or calculate the Calorie count of a typical portion consumed based on the serving size on the package.

Competency 0002 
Human Development

2. Which example best illustrates children who are in the associative developmental stage of play?

  1. A five-year-old child assigns roles to peers before pretending to be working in a doctor's office.
  2. A two-year-old child models another child playing with blocks after observing the other child for a short period of time.
  3. Several four-year-old children sit at a table together drawing pictures and sharing a set of crayons.
  4. A group of three-year-old children run around the room pretending to be cars, making engine noises and honking at each other when their paths intersect.
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Correct Response: D. This item requires examinees to demonstrate understanding of the stages and characteristics of physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development throughout the life span. Before young children begin to fully engage with others in cooperative play, they tend to play together by associating in loosely structured activities. A group of children pretending to be cars driving around and honking at each other without specifically assigned roles or planning of purposeful interactions is an example of this developmental stage, which is known as associative play.

Competency 0003 
Family Studies and Parenting

3. Rajesh and Marcella, a recently married couple, come from different cultural backgrounds. When planning how to raise their children to appreciate their multicultural heritage, it is important for the family to begin by:

  1. allowing the children to decide what to adopt from each parent's culture.
  2. providing the children with access to different kinds of media from both cultural backgrounds.
  3. maintaining and valuing family traditions from both cultural backgrounds.
  4. choosing one culture to teach the children about first and introducing the other when the children are older.
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Correct Response: C. This item requires examinees to demonstrate understanding of the characteristics of healthy families and ways of promoting the development and maintenance of healthy families. Children best learn to respect and value family traditions when behaviors, activities, and beliefs are modeled in positive ways by their parents and other family members. With parents from two different cultural backgrounds, children are most likely to understand and develop appreciation for both sides of their cultural heritage by participating in important traditions related to each as a part of family life. Family discussions about the purpose and value of various traditions and beliefs can enhance the children's appreciation.

Competency 0004 
Interpersonal and Family Relationships and Community Connections

4. An employee has asked a colleague for feedback on a recent presentation about a new business venture. Which response by the colleague best represents constructive feedback that will help this employee improve performance?

  1. "I really liked how you used the slides to highlight the main points, but I was a little confused about the graphs. It would help me if you explained more about what those are illustrating."
  2. "You talked at length about what our company is doing now but you didn't talk enough about what our company will be doing in the future."
  3. "When you present, you usually talk too fast. Try to talk slower so everyone can keep up. It also makes you seem nervous and makes it hard to pay attention to what you say."
  4. "I felt your presentation lacked adequate details. I think you should make it longer and give more examples. Let me know if you want some help."
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Correct Response: A. This item requires examinees to demonstrate knowledge of ways of promoting positive interpersonal relationships and communication skills in communicating within the family, workplace, and community settings. Supportive and constructive feedback that is most likely to encourage a colleague to improve performance begins with acknowledgment of the positive and effective parts of the performance before addressing areas that need improvement. Feedback will be most effectively and willingly received by the colleague if it provides reasoned and factual, rather than emotional, assessment of problem areas and offers constructive suggestions for addressing the problems.

Competency 0005 
Education and Early Childhood

5. Which strategy is most important for a teacher to keep in mind when planning learning activities for children in a mixed-age prekindergarten class of three- to five-year-olds?

  1. building opportunities for younger children to engage in learning activities independently of the older children
  2. ensuring that the majority of learning activities promote the development of fine-motor skills
  3. providing a range of learning activities that are suited to the developmental level of each child
  4. developing a schedule for assessing children when they are engaged in structured learning activities
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Correct Response: C. This item requires examinees to demonstrate understanding of developmentally appropriate activities for guiding experiences and growth for young children in play, character development, literacy, art, music and movement, nutrition, health and wellness, science, and math. In their first years of education, children develop attitudes toward learning and themselves as learners that stay with them all their lives, so it is important to provide young children with positive and successful learning experiences. Because children develop physically and cognitively at different rates and have different learning preferences, there will be many developmental levels among the children in a mixed-age prekindergarten. To best promote positive and successful learning experiences for all the children, it would be most important to design learning activities for different ages, developmental levels, and learning preferences.

Competency 0006 
Textiles and Design

6. Use the guidelines below to answer the question that follows.

These guidelines would be most appropriate for working with fabrics made from:

  1. linen.
  2. cotton.
  3. microfiber.
  4. wool.
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Correct Response: C. This item requires examinees to demonstrate familiarity with the characteristics and application of fibers and textiles, and evaluating and selecting textile products as applied to housing and apparel. Microfiber is composed of very fine, densely woven fibers, so it creates a soft drape but does not hold sharp, crisp seams and is most appropriate for designs characterized by soft, flowing lines, such as a kimono. On microfiber, patterns are laid out as for fabrics with nap. The fine fibers conduct heat more easily than thicker fibers, so low-temperature interfacing must be used. Because the fine fibers also unravel easily, it is important to finish seams with bias tape or by using a two-thread serger.

Competency 0007 
Consumer Skills and Resource Management

7. Which scenario illustrates a case in which consumers must understand potentially fraudulent uses of technology in order to protect themselves?

  1. A consumer buys a new computer that stops working after one month. The consumer calls the company to arrange repairs but the company requires the consumer to ship the computer back at the consumer's expense rather than sending a technician to repair it.
  2. A consumer gets an urgently worded e-mail from a bank asking the consumer to click on a link to the bank's Web site to retrieve a message. After clicking on the link, the consumer must enter his or her bank account number in order to access the message, which consists of an advertisement.
  3. A consumer takes out a payday loan using an online service and finds that the interest rate charged by the company who provided the loan is extremely high. When the consumer is unable to pay back the loan on time, the interest adds up very quickly to an amount far greater than the original loan.
  4. A consumer subscribes to a Web message board that is free for the first three months. The consumer is required to enter payment information before the free trial begins and the subscription is automatically renewed after the free trial ends. The consumer's card is then charged monthly until the consumer cancels the subscription.
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Correct Response: B. This item requires examinees to analyze the effects of technology on individual and family resources and decision making. Online banking provides valuable services but also involves the potential for fraudulent use of online connections. In one online form of fraud, known as phishing, phishers use e-mail designed to look like a message from a consumer's bank to illegally obtain account numbers and passwords. Legitimate bank transactions do not ask for account information via e-mail.

Competency 0008 
Workplace Skills and Careers

8. Students in a class on workplace skills are asked to demonstrate conflict-resolution skills by role-playing the following scenario.

Several employees are holding a business meeting to discuss a new project. The agenda items for the meeting are crucial to the success of this project and specific decisions must be made quickly for the project to meet a tight timeline. One employee is well known for telling jokes and stories during work meetings with little regard for the time limitations. This employee starts to tell a story at the beginning of the meeting. A colleague is visibly irritated that nobody is taking charge of the situation to focus the meeting on the important goals.

The student playing the role of the meeting leader is asked to resolve the impending conflict. Which response by the student best illustrates a productive way to resolve this kind of workplace conflict?

  1. "We'd love to hear about that—it sounds like a great story, but we really need to get through this agenda. Can you tell us about it during lunch?"
  2. "We don't have time for stories right now. If we don't make these key decisions, the project will fail and I won't let that happen."
  3. "This group is having a hard time focusing on the task at hand. I'm going to reschedule the meeting until later in the day."
  4. "Let's hear your story and then we'll get started on this meeting. This will be a stressful project; we might as well begin with a good laugh."
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Correct Response: A. This item requires examinees to demonstrate understanding of strategies for working effectively in teams, identify procedures for managing conflict in the workplace, and accept responsibility for one's actions. To diffuse a potential conflict in a workplace meeting, it is important for a leader to address the situation directly and factually, acknowledge the issue, discuss its impact, and provide an actionable solution. In the case of a digression from important business as a meeting participant begins to tell a story, the meeting leader can diffuse a potential conflict by offering a positive acknowledgment that the story is worth telling, followed by a factual reminder that time is short and the meeting needs to stick with the planned agenda. By offering a positive suggestion, the meeting leader acknowledges the value of what the storyteller has to say, but makes clear what the priorities of the meeting need to be.