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.
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.
Facts and details are those elements of any reading passage that offer information particular to it, fleshing out the main concepts and revealing more knowledge.
A student who is able to read a passage and then demonstrate thorough recollection of facts and details contained within it is a student who has closely read the text offered to them, whereas a student who is unable to recall facts and details when asked to has not engaged with the text on more than a very surface level.
Recalling facts and details as demonstrated in this way is therefore an important part of reading comprehension and one of the 12 reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online.
The ability to recall facts and details in a reading passage illustrates that the student has been paying attention, but also that they have gone some way to understanding what they have read before they have been asked to reflect on it further. It’s unlikely that a student who cannot recollect the facts and details they are being asked to engage with has properly read the text, and as such this strategy offers an early indication – coming second as it does in every exercise throughout the CARS & STARS Online program – as to whether a student has closely read a reading passage or merely skimmed it.
Questions about facts and details in CARS & STARS Online simply ask students about something that was directly stated in the passage, but which they could only identify with close reading.
A student who is able to identify the facts and details they are being asked about correctly is one who has read the passage involved and been able to understand and remember information contained within it. This demonstrates the grasp of literacy needed to advance to the higher-order thinking required in the other strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online, and in reading comprehension as a whole.
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.
