Podcast Transcript
Questions about facts and opinions ask you to find which statements are fact statements and which statements are opinion statements. Remember, a fact is something that is true. An opinion tells how a person feels about something. Facts can be proven. Opinions cannot. Statements that are opinions often contain key words such as most, best, nicest and greatest.
In the previous episode, we focused on the eighth reading strategy – Drawing Conclusions & Making Inferences.
This episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast is about Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion, which is one of the twelve main reading strategies that underpin 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: Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion!
The difference between facts and opinions is one that is increasingly contested and increasingly relevant in today’s digital age, where we are constantly bombarded with both.
Where once readers could be more certain about the providence of the information they were consuming, nowadays the line between fact and fiction is more blurred than ever.
Being able to differentiate between whether something is actually a fact or whether it is being expressed as simply the author’s belief is a crucial skill for students growing up in a world where news is more likely to come filtered through Facebook or Twitter than directly from a fact-checked primary source.
Because of the importance of this skill in the twenty-first century, it is a vital prerequisite in turning out young readers who are able to engage with texts at a high level of reading comprehension.
Being able to look at information and think about the reasoning that led to its creation – and whether it is a verifiable fact or something slanted by the agenda of those providing it – is an important life skill, and so one of the twelve reading strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online.
Questions on Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion in the program ask students to determine which statements in a piece are factual statements – based on verifiable fact – and which are opinion statements – expressing a person’s biases or personal judgements instead. Students will operate on the knowledge that while facts can be proven, opinions cannot, even though they may be expressed as if they are definitive statements.
Here are some tips for Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion in any text.
To find out if a statement is a fact, ask yourself, “Can this statement be proved?”
To find out if a statement is an opinion, ask yourself, “Does this statement tell what someone thinks or feels?”
Look for clue words that signal an opinion, such as think, feel, believe, greatest, best and worst.
Now that we’ve talked about what this strategy is and how it works, let’s have a go at Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion in a passage ourselves: and answering questions the way students do in CARS & STARS Online!
First, I’ll read the passage.
Brendan passed the ball to Benjamin, who was alone under the basket. Benjamin jumped up and slammed the ball through the hoop. Benjamin made it look easy. Benjamin made everything look easy.
Benjamin was awesome. Brendan was very aware of this. Benjamin was the best at whatever he did. Whether it was shooting hoops, doing homework or making friends, Benjamin did it all well. Everything came easy to Benjamin. Brendan always struggled for everything. And people noticed too. Teachers, friends and parents often compared the two brothers.
Brendan shook his head as Benjamin threw the basketball back to him. If only Benjamin wasn’t Brendan’s brother, maybe then Brendan wouldn’t feel as if he was living in his brother’s shadow.
Which statement is a fact?
Benjamin made everything look easy.
Benjamin jumped up and slammed the ball through the hoop.
Benjamin was the best at whatever he did.
Or: Brendan always struggled for everything.
The correct answer here is: Benjamin jumped up and slammed the ball through the hoop.
This answer is correct because it can be proved to be true that this was what Benjamin actually did.
Which statement from the story tells what someone thinks or feels?
Brendan passed the ball to Benjamin, who was alone under the basket.
Brendan shook his head as Benjamin threw the basketball back to him.
Benjamin was awesome.
Or: Teachers, friends and parents often compared the two brothers.
The correct answer here was: Benjamin was awesome.
This answer is correct because it tells what Brendan thinks or feels. What is awesome to one may not be awesome to another. That Benjamin was awesome can’t be proved, so it’s an opinion, not a fact.
Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion is such a vitally important skill to a developing expert reader that it features in levels B to H of CARS & STARS Online.
Once upon a time, children came to school lugging bags full of heavy textbooks for each class. Their work was done in large exercise books that could be misplaced or deliberately forgotten, and every piece of work they submitted was handwritten or printed on paper that would be given to the teacher, who would then have to collate an entire classroom’s worth of loose sheets. They were also dealing with carting around their own copies of textbooks, class records, corrected work and any of the loose paper detritus of modern education.
Does this sound familiar? Quite apart from the back strain possible for all concerned, it’s best we don’t think about the small forest every student has been indirectly responsible for cutting down over the course of their F–12 years.
But this was the way of the past. In the future, teachers will teach and students will learn in the paperless classroom. A classroom where the majority of learning is done on devices, where students are instantly linked to each other and to the teacher, and where records and results are instantly updated. Paperless schools are better for the environment and for the spine. They remove headaches surrounding tracking down errant pieces of work for both students and educators, and they appeal to a generation of students that is as comfortable with technology as they are with breathing.
CARS & STARS Online is fully committed to the ideal of the paperless classroom. In fact, if you so choose it can be a completely digital experience for both student and educator.
Students read stories on their devices and answer multiple-choice questions immediately afterwards by selecting options rather than marking worksheets or submitting written answers. Results are transmitted instantly with no handover process necessary. Gone are the days of children having to remember to bring their written homework with them to school the next day for submission and marking. With CARS & STARS Online, the process is entirely automated and completely integrated into the student experience.
Best of all, this digital experience can travel with both the student and the teacher – CARS & STARS Online is accessible from any device at any time.
For teachers, CARS & STARS Online eliminates the need to hand out and take in heavy textbooks, and there is no work to collect at the end of the class for marking. In fact, there’s barely any marking – student responses are immediately checked upon submission and require no correction. Records of results and student progress are all part of the system. For teachers, CARS & STARS Online removes heavy, time-consuming paper tasks and allows them to focus on the most important element – their teaching.
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 tenth reading strategy – Identifying Author’s Purpose.
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See you in the next episode, and thanks for listening!
