What we read in life, and what we need to read, isn’t always served us to us on a platter. Often, we need to do the hard work of placing information in context and using our prior knowledge to work out what is being presented to us in a fragmentary way and make it meaningful. Good reading comprehension skills can help a person faced with these kinds of fragments and put them into a meaningful context by providing them with the ability to:
Identify key information: Good reading comprehension skills enable individuals to quickly identify the most important information in a text. They can recognise main ideas, key concepts and supporting details that can help them to make sense of textual fragments.
Make connections: Good reading comprehension skills enable individuals to make connections between different pieces of information. They can use their prior knowledge and experience to fill in gaps and make meaning from seemingly disparate pieces of information.
Infer meaning: Good reading comprehension skills enable individuals to infer meaning from context. They can use the surrounding information to make educated guesses about the meaning of unfamiliar words, phrases and concepts.
Evaluate credibility: Good reading comprehension skills enable individuals to evaluate the credibility of information presented in textual fragments. They can assess the reliability of sources, identify bias and propaganda, and distinguish fact from opinion.
Synthesise information: Good reading comprehension skills enable individuals to synthesise information from multiple sources. They can combine information from different fragments to create a more complete understanding of a topic.
Good reading comprehension skills can help individuals to make sense of fragmented texts and information presented in pieces, and put it into a meaningful context by enabling them to identify key information, make connections, infer meaning, evaluate credibility and synthesise information from multiple sources. All of these are skills built on in the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program.
CARS & STARS Online is a digital reading comprehension program based on twelve core reading strategies that is designed to turn every student into a comfortable and proficient reader who can approach every type of text with an advanced level of reading comprehension.
A reader who has progressed through CARS & STARS Online won’t just be able to read a text, they’ll be able to determine why they think it was written and what the person who wrote it was trying to get them to think when they read it. What’s more, they’ll be able to do this and many more textual analysis skills as second nature rather than as additional work, because they’ve been made familiar with them across the breadth of the entire program.
CARS & STARS Online aims to take students and make them informed, evaluative interpreters of any text. Reading comprehension is a more vital skill than ever, and a student schooled by CARS & STARS Online will be able to perform high-level textual analysis as second nature, on every text.
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.
