While journalists today might face the reality of a profession that is more precarious and uncertain than at any time in the past, journalism is still central and critical to how people receive, process and parse the events of the world around them. While the primary focus of the profession remains the same, it is the medium by which it is done that’s been transformed significantly – digital news has been the biggest change to hit the job since the invention of the printing press, upending livelihoods, altering ways of doing things that have remained the same for centuries, and shaking the world of news to its core.
Though the world in which it is practised and disseminated has changed fundamentally, many of the essential skills behind journalism remain the same – if anything, they have become more important than ever in an age when the provenance of information is often uncertain, and “fake news” (both in the original sense of undermining legitimate reportage, and in the sense of misinformation) abounds.
Reading comprehension remains central to journalism, and it informs every skill required by a good journalist today just as it always has. Firstly, the ability to undertake extensive research is pivotal to every form of journalism. A journalist works best when they can understand the needs of the reader and what they want, taking on information accordingly. As a good reader they can evaluate sources quickly and accurately. The related skills of attention to detail and the ability to meaningfully engage with text to extract meaning from it – and use it for their own ends – are all underpinned by reading comprehension.
Reading comprehension helps students to be able to understand and interpret information by making connections between what they read and what they already know and experience, as well as enabling them to self-select for what is important in a text, while being able to tell the difference between fact and fiction – and, hopefully, to be able to accurately discern a writer’s point of view to better determine whether they are being manipulated by what is being presented to them.
All these skills are represented in the core reading strategies that underpin CARS & STARS Online, a digital reading program designed to turn every student into a proficient and capable reader, with advanced levels of reading comprehension. 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.
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.
