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.
Making predictions involves taking the information presented in a text and using it to have an informed guess about what might happen next. Clues from the text can be used to determine what is most likely to happen in regard to a specific aspect of the story or information presented, but the student is asked to think beyond the details directly related there.
The answers to questions about making predictions are not found directly in the text, rather the reader is asked to engage with the information and ideas presented there and to concoct their own plausible future based on what they think is most likely to happen.
Making predictions is an important skill for developing readers to master because exercising it correctly requires a detailed understanding of text that goes beyond simply reading what happens and into a more nuanced level of comprehension.
In correctly answering questions about predictions in CARS & STARS Online a student can plausibly and realistically suggest what might happen next given the events depicted. This skill requires them to fully understand a text in order to be able to decide which outcome is most likely based on the information already given in the text itself, but the answers themselves can only be reached when a student has fully mastered what they have read.
Making predictions is a vital skill for readers and an integral part of the twelve reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online, because it moves students from skills that involve only interpreting information given in a text to thinking further about the concepts involved and coming to their own decisions about where things might go after it. In this way it is vital in transitioning from lower-order to higher-order thinking, and moving reading comprehension from a more literal interpretation to one involving further thinking and imagination.
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.
