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.
One of the hallmarks of an engaged, competent reader working at a high level of reading comprehension is the ability to see beyond a text – what it merely presents – to look at how a text works and why. The skill of identifying an author’s purpose involves such an ability, looking beyond what a text merely is to understand what an author hoped to achieve by writing it and discerning their point of view.
Readers will be able to identify an author’s rationale for writing a text, looking beyond what is simply said within it to think about why they would choose to write it. Students will understand the suggested agenda behind a text – that is, why the author would opt to write about something and do so in the way that they have.
Traditionally authors write for one of a few main reasons. For example, they might be trying to persuade the reader to their point of view, and so texts will present information coloured by that viewpoint. Being able to identify that a text is trying to persuade does not necessarily mean that it hasn’t been able to do so, but a student being able to tell that the writing is slanted in this way illustrates that they can think critically about texts and display higher-order thinking.
A reader who can critically evaluate a text and the possible reasons for its creation – and particularly the attitude of the person who wrote it – is better equipped to deal with a fast-paced, information-rich 21st-century environment in which the veracity of information and sources should always be called into question, and where the provenance of news is not always easy to ascertain.
For these reasons, Identifying Author’s Purpose is a crucial skill and so one of the twelve main reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online. Questions about Identifying Author’s Purpose ask a student to consider why the author wrote the passage, which involves thinking about a text as an artefact created for a specific reason and with a particular agenda.
Students who can think about texts in this way show a developed reading comprehension ability as well as a readiness to critically evaluate what they read that goes beyond simply what a text is about on the surface level.
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.
