11 Plus Exams Forum

Hi,
My dd is finding the odd one out type questions difficult. Does anyone have any good tips as to how to help her with these?

I always think that the most difficult element in these questions is the distractor(s) - the thing that doesn't matter but which you think might e.g. you desperately count up all the stars within the triangles trying to see which one is different when in fact the different one is the triangle which is facing the other way or doesn't have a right angle etc and the number of stars is irrelevant.

The most useful thing we found was to have that mental checklist of the elements which might be important and go through them if the answer is not immediately obvious. We used a slightly modified version of the Spotty Pyjamas And Nice Soft Slippers acronym given in the Bond How To book.

This sounds interesting and helpful. Can you tell us what the 'Spotty Pyjamas And Nice Soft Slippers' refer to - symmetry etc? What are all the others?

I found this in my notes:

SHAPE
POSITION
ANGLE
NUMBER
SHADING
SIZE

DS says he will remember it as SPANSS or SSSPAN

totally agree with Alex's comments. My DD initially started counting all the detail. Take a step back and look at the bigger picture - are they all the same shape for example, the same number of sides, start on the big stuff and work in then start moving into the finer detail if you haven't got the answer.

Hi
I read your comments with a very keen interest. I was surprised by how difficult children found these 'out one out' questions and the difficulties with distractions are spot on. I use a checklist too: Amount, colour, direction, overlap, position, reflection, rotation, shape and finally size. I have found that this helps the children enormously. The other point to bear in mind is that when looking for the 'odd one out' that particular feature has to be the same in all the others. I get my children to say for example: "B is the odd one out because all the others have/are .......'