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.
Drawing conclusions from texts read and being able to make inferences from information presented in a passage is a crucial skill in developing advanced reading comprehension.
Both of these skills require a student reader to go beyond what is simply presented in a passage and obliges them to critically and imaginatively engage with stories to not just be able to relate how something happened, but to get at the why of events and the motivations behind them.
Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences is one of the twelve reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online because harnessing this skill is a crucial step in a student moving to a more developed level of reading comprehension.
A student who is able to master this strategy will be able to habitually look behind a text to think critically about the information presented within it, not just relying on what is directly stated in the story but being able to think deeper about why things have happened the way they did and why.
Questions about this strategy in the CARS & STARS Online program will regularly ask students to expound on the motivations behind an action or event that go unexplained explicitly in the text – asking students why they think someone did something – or asking students to infer based on what is most likely or probable, rather than what is definite.
Questions about Drawing Conclusions and Making Inferences move students from a direct, lower-order level of thinking about texts read to a more indirect, higher-order level of thinking, where meaning is derived not simply from what is explicitly stated but from critically and imaginatively engaging with text to think about the story and events beyond those presented.
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.
