Podcast Transcript
The main idea of a reading passage is a sentence that tells what the passage is mostly about. Questions about main idea might ask you to find what a passage is mostly about or mainly about. The questions might also ask you to choose the best title for a passage. When answering a question about main idea, ask yourself, “What is the passage mostly about?” Then choose your answer.
the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online digital reading comprehension program form an underlying instructional framework that recurs throughout every level and pr.
This episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast is about Finding the Main Idea, 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 ovides 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: Finding the Main Idea!
The ability to identify a central concept in a passage or collection of ideas is one that will hold students in good stead throughout their life, and not just in the teaching of reading comprehension.
Students utilising this skill will be able to cut through the details and extraneous information in any presentation of knowledge. They will be able to arrive at what they think is the most important idea underpinning it, allowing them to focus on that vital point and sort through ideas so that they can be confident they are approaching the most important, central idea rather than being bogged down in subsidiary details. This skill is particularly important in areas of study and knowledge acquisition, allowing as it does for the allocation of focus based on priority.
This skill is also simply a fundamental aspect of evaluating knowledge and ideas – if a student can identify what the main idea, central theme or defining concept is in something, then they have already gone partway toward demonstrating a cogent understanding of it.
Finding the Main Idea is therefore a vitally important skill, and thus it is quite rightly one of the 12 Reading Strategies that underpin CARS & STARS Online.
The main idea of a reading passage is a sentence that tells what the passage is mostly about. Questions about main idea in CARS & STARS Online might ask students to find what a passage is mostly about or mainly about. The questions might also ask them to choose the best title for a passage. When answering a question about main idea, students are initially told to ask themselves, “What is the passage mostly about?” They then choose their answer.
In fact, Finding the Main Idea is the first strategy on which students are asked to answer questions throughout the entirety of the CARS & STARS Online program, demonstrating its centrality to reading comprehension and importance in the program as a whole. Students are much more likely to do well in the other targeted strategies if they have first been able to accurately identify the main idea, because they have already shown a fundamental, basic understanding of the passage.
Here are some tips for Finding the Main Idea in any text.
Sometimes the main idea is found in the first sentence of a paragraph.
Sometimes the main idea is found in the last sentence of a paragraph.
Sometimes the main idea is not in the passage.
If the main idea isn’t stated, ask yourself, “What is the passage mostly about?”
Now that we’ve talked about what this strategy is and how it works, let’s have a go at finding the main idea in a passage ourselves: and answering questions the way students do in CARS & STARS Online!
First, I’ll read the passage:
Many places in Africa are more modern than people realise. And there are both conveniences and consequences to deal with. Cairo is the largest city in Egypt. This city has traffic jams that rival those of any city in Australia. In west Africa, Togo is home to the world’s largest phosphate mine. Nigeria alone has more than 50 cities with large populations. At the Ivory Coast’s National University, students study arts and sciences. The Kenyan coast is popular with tourists. They enjoy its sandy beaches and fine restaurants.
What is the main idea of the article?
Is it:
Cairo is the largest city in Egypt.
Many places in Africa are more modern than people realise.
The coast of Kenya has many fine beaches.
Nigeria has more than 50 cities with large populations.
The correct answer here was: Many places in Africa are more modern than people realise.
This answer is correct because it states the topic and tells the most important idea about it. All the other ideas in the article support this idea.
And where or how did you find the main idea?
Was it:
in the first sentence of the passage
in the last sentence of the passage
in the middle of the passage
Or: by thinking about which idea is most important in the passage
The correct answer here was: in the first sentence of the passage.
This answer is correct because the first sentence states the topic and the most important idea about it: “Many places in Africa are more modern than people realise.” The other sentences in the passage support this idea.
Finding the Main Idea is such an important reading strategy, and so central to being a good reader, that it features in every level of the CARS & STARS Online program.
Education, like everything, has changed a lot and yet stayed much the same over the last few centuries. We mostly no longer live in societies where every student attends the same one-room schoolhouse where they’re taught by the same teacher, but actual classroom practice would still be recognisable to people from those times. Advances in pedagogy and approach often play out in these same familiar environs, in the sense that the way we teach might change a little, but the basic setup of a class remains the same.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way? Advances in technology have made the world smaller, allowing instantaneous communication between people from all over the planet. Business, government, even our personal social interactions have all been shaken up by this technological revolution. So why should the humble, old-fashioned classroom be immune?
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.
This means, in practice, that students can undertake CARS & STARS Online work from anywhere with an internet connection, on any modern device able to access the internet. Gone are the days where students would have to be chained to their desks with paper and pen, completing the same work at the same time, under the watchful eye of a teacher who will then take away that work and mark it all themselves.
With CARS & STARS Online students can work at school, or at home. They can work through exercises on holiday, or to catch up on weekends. They can be working in their bedroom, or outside, or even at the beach or the park. The only limit is their device’s connectivity. They are not bound by attendance or school hours, or anything other than their desire to learn.
CARS & STARS Online can make your students better readers, but it can also make them readers anywhere – at whatever time of the day they choose.
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 next reading strategy – Recalling Facts and Details.
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See you in the next episode, and thanks for listening!
