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.
A good summary of a text involves relating the most important parts of it without straying into extraneous facts or details.
Summarising moves beyond simply Finding the Main Idea – the first of the 12 main reading strategies in CARS & STARS Online – to being able to describe the most important points that contribute to it. A summary doesn’t just recount the main events, it shows the relationship between details and the main idea, illustrating an ability to separate important details from supporting ones.
A student who can accurately summarise a text has not only demonstrated that they completely understand it, but that they do so at such a developed level that they can boil it down to its most important component parts and communicate that to others.
Summarising involves having complete command over every detail in a text and being able to determine which are most important and which are merely offering subsidiary information. In this way, summarising encapsulates most if not all of the abilities and skills demonstrated in highly developed reading comprehension.
Summarising is the last of the twelve main reading strategies that underpin the CARS & STARS Online reading comprehension program. Demonstrating the ability to summarise an entire text shows that a student has understood it at a high level, but also illustrates that they are not distracted by what is not important within it and can distil their understanding to its most essential parts.
Summarising involves not just relating the most important details of a text, but being able to sum it up in a way that goes to the heart of what it is about. Summarising comes last in the twelve main reading strategies in CARS & STARS Online because in summing up a text a student is building on all the knowledge they have demonstrated across the other eleven reading strategies up until that point. In this way they are not just summarising the story they have read but also their own understanding of it.
The ability to summarise information in this way is an important life skill that allows readers to demonstrate understanding without waffling or getting bogged down in unimportant details. This is the heart of reading comprehension and being an informed and selective consumer of media, be it for news or entertainment.
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.
