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.
Reading figurative language requires a more developed level of reading comprehension because it involves a student not simply understanding what is directly stated but moving to thinking in a more abstract and complex way. For this reason, the skill of being able to interpret figurative language is a vital one for any advanced reader, and as such it makes up one of the twelve main reading strategies that underpin the CARS & STARS Online reading comprehension program.
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 a text to think about the story and events beyond those presented in it.
The sequence in which ideas are presented in a text is one of the first things students must be able to ascertain in order to be able to fully derive meaning from it, and so the notion of Understanding Sequence is a crucial factor in reading comprehension and one of the 12 central reading strategies in CARS & STARS Online.
The ability to recall facts and details in a reading passage illustrates that the student has been paying attention, but also that they have gone some way to understanding what they have read before they have been asked to reflect on it further. This is therefore an important part of reading comprehension and one of the 12 reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online.
