Provide Differentiated Instruction – CARS & STARS Online — Help Centre

There are two easy ways to provide differentiated instruction in the classroom using the STARS Series.

By Reading Strategy

Use the results from the Pretests in the CARS Series to diagnose the individual needs of the students in your classroom.

Then use the matching STARS level to provide targeted instruction in one specific strategy or in several strategies to remediate areas that need improvement and/or reinforcement.

Or, you may wish to provide instruction using the entire STARS level to build students' basic knowledge of all the reading strategies.

By Reading Level

Students in the same classroom are likely to be reading at different skill levels (below year level, at year level or above year level). You can use the levelled modules in the STARS Series (Reading Levels P–H) to meet this need.

To enable this type of differentiated instruction, the sequence of the strategies in the STARS Series are the same from lesson to lesson (with some exceptions in the earliest Reading Levels). So all students in the classroom receive the same reading-strategy instruction but work with appropriately levelled reading passages.

For example, some year-two students may be working on-level at level B, which contains reading passages that don't extend beyond a year-two reading level. At the same time, other students in the class may be assigned an above-level module, while other students may be assigned a below-level module.

If you would like to provide explicit teaching, you can instruct your students to ignore their six recommended strategies as soon as they have completed their 5 Pretests. Equally importantly, to ensure your students are on the right lesson for the week, you can make use of the Lock Settings to simply lock all the lessons excluding the one you want to teach for the week. In this way your students will be able to solely focus on that particular lesson.

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