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.
Recent studies and research project have shown the effectiveness of the approach featured in CARS & STARS Online in improving student outcomes and allowing students to achieve advanced levels of reading comprehension.
In the 2017 “action research project” completed as part of a Master’s thesis, “Implementing the STARS Program to Improve Reading Comprehension”, Nathan Fischer set out to determine whether a correlation existed “between the implementation of specific reading comprehension strategies and analysis and practice of specific aspects of reading passages with scores in reading comprehension”. Using the printed version of the program from which CARS & STARS Online is derived, STARS instruction was implemented over an eight-week period, with the CARS module used to gather baseline data and assess student progress.
According to Fischer’s work, “The findings from the collected data suggest that the STARS program has a positive impact on reading comprehension [, while the] quantitative data suggests that the STARS program helps increase the scores on CARS tests.” Analysis of the data collected suggested that students who used STARS showed greater gains in reading comprehension than those students in the control group.
The recent report Overcoming the Odds: A study of Australia’s top-performing disadvantaged schools (Joseph, 2019) is focused on the ways successful schools that are deemed to be socio-economically disadvantaged have gone on to perform well.
One of the conclusions of the report is that some of the key weapons in combatting disadvantage in education are the use of data-informed practice, as well as direct and explicit instruction. The use of these helped put some of the top-performing disadvantaged schools where they are today.
CARS & STARS Online is uniquely placed to help disadvantaged schools and students in this area because it has been designed from the ground up to bring the benefits of data gathering and implementation to the classroom using ongoing and targeted formative assessment and instruction.
The report observed that the most common features of lessons in the high-performing yet disadvantaged schools it studied were “a defined and stated lesson objective; immediate feedback; review of previously taught content; clear and unambiguous language; the teacher frequently checking for student understanding; the teacher demonstrating the knowledge or skill to be learnt; and students practising new skills with teacher guidance” (Joseph, 2019, p. 9).
CARS & STARS Online perfectly complements these features. Each lesson clearly and explicitly states what students are to do and the consistency of objectives and instruction throughout the program means that students are never in the dark as to why they are doing it.
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.
