Podcast Transcript
Every reading passage contains facts and details. The facts and details tell more about the main idea. Questions about facts and details ask you about something that was stated in the passage. To answer a question about a fact or detail, look back to the passage to find the answer.
In the previous episode, we focused on the first strategy – Finding the Main Idea.
This episode of the CARS & STARS Online podcast is about Recalling Facts and Details, 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?
Learning to read can be a difficult task, but teaching someone to read can be another thing entirely. Learning to decode letters and sound out words are one thing, but neither skill really assists in the most important aspect of reading – that of comprehending what one reads, of being able to understand what something is saying rather than just being able to read it as text.
Understanding text in this way has often been something students have been expected to just pick up on their own – or something that will develop as the ability to decode the text on a literal level does. One reason why this might be the case is because understanding is such a nebulous concept – we can tell students can read something if they can read it to us, but we can only really determine whether they understand it fully with some much more in-depth work.
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 each and every student.
And now, onto our main strategy for this episode: Recalling Facts and Details!
Facts and details are those elements of any reading passage that offer information particular to it, fleshing out the main concepts and revealing more knowledge.
A student who is able to read a passage and then demonstrate thorough recollection of facts and details contained within it is a student who has closely read the text offered to them, whereas a student who is unable to recall facts and details when asked to has not engaged with the text on more than a very surface level.
Recalling facts and details as demonstrated in this way is therefore an important part of reading comprehension and one of the 12 reading strategies that make up 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. It’s unlikely that a student who cannot recollect the facts and details they are being asked to engage with has properly read the text, and as such this strategy offers an early indication – coming second as it does in every exercise throughout the CARS & STARS Online program – as to whether a student has closely read a reading passage or merely skimmed it.
Questions about facts and details in CARS & STARS Online simply ask students about something that was directly stated in the passage, but which they could only identify with close reading.
A student who is able to identify the facts and details they are being asked about correctly is one who has read the passage involved and been able to understand and remember information contained within it. This demonstrates the grasp of literacy needed to advance to the higher-order thinking required in the other strategies that make up CARS & STARS Online, and in reading comprehension as a whole.
Here are some tips for Recalling Facts and Details in any text.
Look for sentences that provide information about the main idea.
Look for sentences that tell more about: Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?
Now that we’ve talked about what this strategy is and how it works, let’s have a go at Recalling Facts and Details in a passage ourselves: and answering questions the way students do in CARS & STARS Online!
First, I’ll read the passage. This text is from a travel blog: This log of my journey began at Bramley Hall. For those of you who have not had the misery of spending time at the Hall, Bramley is a large house with over 30 rooms. It was fashioned many years ago from dull grey stone taken from a nearby quarry. The glass of the windows is so thick and the panes so small, each separated by a thick bar of lead, that little sunlight is ever able to reach inside the house.
A guidebook I once read described Bramley Hall as imposing and majestic. But the book was very old. Whatever majesty the house once had had long since vanished by the time I first touched the front door’s tarnished brass knocke
How is Bramley Hall constructed?
Is it:
as a large house with over 30 rooms
as a nearby quarry
as a room inside a majestic building
or: as a boarding school
The correct answer here was: as a large house with over 30 rooms
This answer is correct because the second sentence states that Bramley is a large house with over 30 rooms.
And a second question on Recalling Facts and Details.
Bramley Hall is constructed of:
thick bars of lead.
dull grey stone.
thick panes of glass.
or: tarnished brass.
The correct answer here was: dull grey stone.
This answer is correct because the third sentence states that Bramley Hall was fashioned many years ago from dull grey stone taken from a nearby quarry.
Recalling Facts and Details 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 – though it’s called Finding Details in Level AA, which is for pre-readers.
We often take reading comprehension for granted. But can you imagine how boring it must be to be able to read fluently – that is, to know how to sound out words and say them to sound like you know what you’re reading – but not to have any real understanding of what it is that you are reading? Without actual comprehension, reading is just a frustrating, pointless exercise in word finding and endless, meaningless repetition.
Extensive studies have shown that the major way “good” readers differ from “poor” readers is in how they think about text before, after and as they read it. Good readers are often strategic readers. Comprehension strategies are procedures that are under the control of a reader, who makes decisions about which strategies to use and when to use them, even if they’re doing this at an automatic level.
“Poor” readers, on the other hand, don’t read strategically. They don’t think about how to approach a text. They don’t really think about a text much while reading it – instead focusing on just making it through to the end – and they show little inclination for or ability to think about a text once they’ve finished it.
The difference between good and poor readers then is not so much one of ability as one of approach. Fortunately, this can be learned.
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 text. Great 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.
If you have missed out our previous episode, please click here. The next episode will be focused on the third reading strategy – Understanding Sequence.
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See you in the next episode, and thanks for listening!
