Being a highly skilled, competent reader is a skill that improves every learner’s life. It’s absolutely pivotal in terms of us being able to gain meaning from our world and to learning the skills that make us productive and happy adult members of society.
Behaviour problems can interfere with classroom engagement for everyone, not just those students who are “acting out”. It is not a coincidence that classrooms with high-performing students are often places where there are the lowest levels of behaviour issues.
Students don’t generally come to school and instantly hate being there – this behaviour, like everything else at school, is learned. If a student feels they are experiencing more failure than success, they often learn to hate it. A study by Mash and Wolfe (2013) showed that “younger children having difficulty in reading comprehension and literacy end up showing problematic behaviours in their future years”.
The connection is obvious: a child having serious difficulty in reading comprehension can easily get frustrated and start to behave in ways that don’t help anybody, least of all themselves. The negative effect of poor reading skills only increases over time as older students become more aware of their performance compared with their peers, and because reading is so important these negative behaviours feed into other subject areas as well.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading comprehension program where students gain mastery of reading comprehension through multiple-choice questions targeting 12 core reading strategies.
With CARS & STARS Online, you can have every student in a class working on improving their reading comprehension, in the same program, but at the specific level appropriate to them. Students move to the next level when they have proven themselves proficient in one, and students struggling with understanding a certain level can move down to the level beneath that to hone their skills at the teacher’s discretion. All this is facilitated by instantly updating, easily accessible data about student progress.
In this way, instruction with CARS & STARS Online is specific and individualised, so teachers using it realise quickly what they need to focus on for each student. They can then pivot to addressing it easily and immediately, given the flexibility of the program. Because less time is needed to find what they need to focus on, more time is available to target that area – and to work to improve it.
The program is aimed at foundational gaps in comprehension and improving them, so it restores hope and confidence in students who might otherwise get disheartened. Because exercises directly target what students need to know, they’re more engaging and enjoyable, and there’s a tremendous sense of achievement –and what they’re learning is so important that, once mastered, it flows through to other subjects, classes and aspects of their daily life.
By engaging students directly before they “fall through the cracks”, teachers can ensure students aren’t just becoming better readers – they’re becoming happier and more well-adjusted people, who also have less need to become frustrated or disruptive.
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.
