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 difference between facts and opinions is one that is increasingly contested and increasingly relevant in today’s digital age, where we are constantly bombarded with both.
Where once readers could be more certain about the providence of the information they were consuming, nowadays the line between fact and fiction is more blurred than ever.
Being able to differentiate between whether something is a fact or whether it is being expressed as simply the author’s belief is a crucial skill for students growing up in a world where news is more likely to come filtered through Facebook or Twitter than directly from a fact-checked primary source.
Because of the importance of this skill in the twenty-first century, it is a vital prerequisite in turning out young readers who can engage with texts at a high level of reading comprehension.
Being able to look at information and think about the reasoning that led to its creation – and whether it is a verifiable fact, or something slanted by the agenda of those providing it – is an important life skill, and so one of the twelve reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online.
Questions on Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion in the program ask students to determine which statements in a piece are factual statements – based on verifiable fact – and which are opinion statements – expressing a person’s biases or personal judgements instead. Students will operate on the knowledge that while facts can be proven, opinions cannot, even though they may be expressed as if they are definitive statements.
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.
