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.
The ability to recognise cause and effect is one of the most important and fundamental skills required to make meaning from text read and to elevate understanding from mere rote repetition of words to actual comprehension.
Something happens, and that causes something else to happen. The existence of an action or event causes or precipitates an effect, the direct or indirect result of the original cause. It sounds pretty simple, put like this, but can you imagine how much more difficult it is to understand a passage or story when you don’t understand the nature of cause and effect occurring within them? Without this vital concept events take place unmoored from reason or consequence, and stories are rendered unintelligible for the reader who has no idea what is going on, and why it is happening.
In order to truly understand what is happening in a story it is absolutely integral to be able to understand why something is happening. For this reason, Recognising Cause and Effect is one of the bedrock strategies featured in CARS & STARS Online, and recurs throughout every level of the program.
Questions about Cause and Effect ask students to drill down into the events of a story or passage and ascertain not just what has happened within it but why things have occurred the way they have. In the earlier levels of the program the relationship between cause and effect is generally a direct and visible one – this happened, which caused this to happen – whereas at the higher levels cause and effect may be slightly more indirect and oblique, with the relationship not stated outright in the text but requiring more advanced textual analysis skills to determine.
Recognising Cause and Effect is an important element not just in reading comprehension but, in a broader sense, a vital life skill for making sense of the world, and for this reason it is a pivotal part of the 12 reading strategies that underpin CARS & STARS Online.
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.
