One way of looking at reading is that in some ways it is essentially a problem-solving task. Comprehending what is read, like problem solving, requires effort, planning, self-monitoring, strategy selection and reflection. As students progress at school, reading materials increase in complexity and so require more effort to decipher while presenting more of a challenge – and, hopefully, more of a reward as well.
Students who approach reading as a problem-solving activity like this, at least theoretically, take an active and strategic approach to reading. They are metacognitively aware of how well they understand what they read. This is one of the many differences between being a truly proficient reader and one who merely grapples with a text. It’s also the difference between being able to read while only employing lower-level thinking – simple, literal, concrete interpretation of text – and being able to read while operating at a higher level of thinking, using complex, non-literal, abstract text-deciphering skills.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension.
The core reading strategies that underpin the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and provides consistency of understanding and instruction for students and teachers alike. These are the tools to solve the problems of reading.
The twelve reading strategies progress from simpler, lower-order thinking skills such as Finding the Main Idea and Recalling Facts and Details to more complex, higher-order concepts such as Identifying Author’s Purpose and Summarising. Initial questions determine students’ mastery of the text at a literal level, while later questions build on this understanding to get to the heart of their conceptual understanding. In this way, in every reading passage across every reading level, students are being asked to perform the same essential tasks – with their difficulty and complexity increasing as the student progresses through the reading levels.
These research-proven strategies, taken together, offer a complete recipe for increased student awareness of textual features and concepts, and provide a direct and understandable pathway to improving reading comprehension for every student. CARS & STARS Online gives students the tools to solve the problems of reading – and become proficient interpreters of any kind of text at the same time.
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.
