At times life as a student can feel like you’re always being judged or evaluated or tested about something. School life can be a barrage of tests, exams, assignments and marking days all seemingly designed to give you a grade that’s all important – until the next one, that is.
Of course, as teachers and educators we now know that evaluation is one of the best tools we have for monitoring student progress and making sure what we are teaching is being received, before it’s too late to do anything about it if it’s not.
But in traditional schooling evaluation is always something that the teacher does to the student. The teacher sets the test, marks the assignment, keeps the record of the results, targets the instruction according to what they’ve gleaned from the evaluation of student work, and just generally takes up one side of what can seem – not just to the student – to be something of a one-sided process.
But what if students were able to be more involved in this evaluative process, so that they could benefit from it more directly – allowing them to keep an eye on their own progress while undertaking tasks and exercises, rather than waiting till long after they are completed to find out how well they went, and to reflect on their own work periodically by design rather than by accident?
CARS & STARS Online has been designed to foster self-assessment and students’ ownership of their own learning. Self-evaluation is so intrinsic to the program that it’s even an explicit part of instruction, with students completing designated “Self-Assessments” throughout every level of the main program. Self-assessment focuses students on the process of performance rather than the end result, an important point of difference in growing a higher-level skill like reading comprehension versus more rote tasks.
Students also benefit from CARS & STARS Online’s instant feedback, whereby every multiple-choice response is immediately marked as correct or incorrect, and there is no time lag between an answer and finding out whether it was right.
Like every stakeholder in CARS & STARS Online, students have instant access to their own results so they can see their own progress across the levels and the reading strategies. Because the reading strategies serve as a familiar organisational framework across the entirety of the program, students will be as familiar as anyone with them and so find their results quite useful and intelligible.
CARS & STARS Online is the digital reading program that allows everyone to have full knowledge of and constant updates on student learning – especially the students themselves!
If you are interested in learning more about the CARS & STARS Online subscriptions and how they can help children to achieve better results, then sign up for a free trial to be an integral part of your child’s reading success.
