Podcast Transcript
Some questions ask you to find how two things are alike or different. This is called comparing and contrasting, or finding likenesses and differences. Questions that ask you to compare or contrast usually contain key words such as most like, different, alike or similar.
In the previous episode, we focused on the fourth reading strategy – Recognising Cause & Effect.
This episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast is about Comparing and Contrasting, which is one of the main reading strategies that underpins the entirety of CARS & STARS Online.
But what are reading strategies, and why should you know about them?
Those elements that are most important for advanced reading comprehension, such as applying prior knowledge, building an extensive vocabulary, and developing critical-thinking capabilities, are skills that are learned and developed on an ongoing basis over time. They are essential in enabling students to engage in close textual analysis and deep, thoughtful reading comprehension across a range of texts and subject areas.
Comprehension can also be enhanced for many students through a set of specific, targeted strategies. Comprehension strategies are conscious plans, steps that many good readers can use to better make sense of texts, regardless of subject or genre. Comprehension strategies help students become purposeful, active readers that are in control of their own reading comprehension and able to think critically about text in any context.
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.
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.
And now, onto our main strategy for this episode: Comparing and Contrasting!
The ability to compare and contrast is a fundamental aspect of reading comprehension and so an important one of the twelve central reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online.
To be able to compare or contrast something – characters, events, descriptions, entire stories, indeed any element of text – requires that you first have a cogent enough understanding of it to be able to evaluate and rightly assess or judge it against something else.
Demonstrating the skill of comparison therefore gives a crucial insight into a reader’s abilities and thought processes, because it requires both a necessary understanding of text read and a comprehension level high enough to be able to critically engage and evaluate the concept in regards to something else, which may be similar in certain aspects or different in others.
Questions about comparison and contrasting in the program often ask a student to undertake textual analysis whereby a closer reading of the text elicits likenesses between two things that are at first glance quite unalike, or to compare two things that might seem more similar and yet determine those aspects that make them crucially different.
A student undertaking CARS & STARS Online will answer questions about comparing and contrasting in every exercise across the program, so central is this ability to the development of a competent and engaged reader who can process text at a high level of understanding.
As with many of the reading strategies featured in CARS & STARS Online, comparing and contrasting is also a skill that, once learnt, will be useful throughout the student’s life and not merely as a reading tool. The ability to think like this – and to be able to evaluate information or concepts as they relate to others – is a crucial aspect of media literacy and life in general in the twenty-first century.
Here are some tips for using Comparing and Contrasting with any text.
To find ways in which things are alike, look for these clue words:
same, like and alike
To find ways in which things are different, look for these clue words:
but, unlike and different
Now that we’ve talked about what this strategy is and how it works, let’s have a go at Comparing and Contrasting in a passage ourselves: and answering questions the way students do in CARS & STARS Online!
First, I’ll read the passage. This text is a film review of a movie based on a book.
If you enjoyed reading Cavedweller by L. R. Epstein, you will be seriously disappointed by the new movie based on one of the best-selling books of all time. There were so many changes made in the movie version of this story, one can only wonder why.
One difference is the title. What was wrong with Cavedweller? Some Hollywood genius must have thought there was quite a lot wrong with this title because the movie is called We Live in Darkness.
The hero of Cavedweller is Sim, a 12-year-old girl who lives in a cave in modern-day France. Sim lives with her grandmother and younger brother. The hero of We Live in Darkness is a boy who appears to be about 16 years old and lives in a cave in modern-day France (I guess they couldn’t change everything) with his grandfather and little sister! In the book, Sim befriends a spider that teaches her how to weave. In the movie, unlike the book, Sim befriends a wolf. As far as this reviewer can determine, the only thing the wolf taught Sim was how to howl. (Too bad he couldn’t teach him how to act!) Two thumbs and two big toes down to We Live in Darkness.
How are the book and the movie different?
Is the answer:
In the book, Sim lives in a cave; in the movie, Sim lives in a palace.
In the book, Sim is a girl about 12 years old; in the movie, Sim is a boy about 16 years old.
In the book, Sim lives with her grandfather; in the movie, Sim lives with his grandmother.
Or: In the book, Sim lives in ancient times; in the movie, Sim lives in modern-day France.
The correct answer here was: In the book, Sim is a girl about 12 years old; in the movie, Sim is a boy about 16 years old.
This answer is correct because the text states that the hero in the book is Sim, a 12-year-old girl, and the hero in the movie is Sim, a boy about 16 years old.
And which clue word signals a contrast about the kind of animal befriended by Sim?
Is it:
alike
similar
different
Or: unlike
The correct answer here was: unlike
This answer is correct because the clue word unlike signals the contrast between the two animals. The text states that “In the movie, unlike the book, Sim befriends a wolf.”
Comparing and Contrasting is a vital skill in a developing and expert reader, and features in every level of CARS & STARS Online from level B through to H.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading comprehension program based around the repeated application of twelve core reading strategies to make students better readers who can analyse and interpret any text at a high level of understanding. The multi-level program is designed to be entirely paper-free, with all student answers being entered directly into the software, and results being instantly recorded and corrected automatically, requiring no teacher marking.
Whereas once upon a time a student undertaking a reading exercise would leave the teacher with work to mark, that they would then convert into the results format they wanted, to later match with every other student and ultimately report to a higher authority, CARS & STARS Online does all of this automatically and instantly. The real benefit of the program for teachers, aside from its proven efficacy in turning students into readers with advanced levels of comprehension, is the ease with which results are collected and the variety of ways in which the program allows the teacher to get a more complete picture of student learning.
From within CARS & STARS Online itself, teachers can access instant overviews of student progress that show how well they are progressing through the various levels of the program, and which areas might need to be targeted for remediation. But this simple overview of a single student’s results is only the beginning.
Class teachers can just as quickly and easily bring up an overview of a group of students, or even the whole class. This takes no more time than viewing the results of a single student, and allows easy comparison and whole-class planning for instruction.
School principals, coordinators or administrators with access to the program can also easily see results – and they can go for an even wider picture, viewing them for groups of classes, year levels or even entire schools.
All of this would previously have required a lot of work – to collect the results, then collate them, then tabulate them in a form for easy comparison, and then to combine with the work of many other teachers undertaking the same arduous process.
With CARS & STARS Online, results are more powerful than ever. And they’re more easily collected, displayed and usefully harnessed, all by a process that occurs automatically and instantly, and which requires no direct teacher intervention to complete.
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.
If you have missed out our previous episode, please click here. The next episode will be focused on the sixth reading strategy – Making Predictions.
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See you in the next episode, and thanks for listening!
