Do the questions interrupt the reader's flow?

We ask students questions at regular points as they read. This allows teachers to see whether careful and focused reading has happened, and gives students a feeling of regular success in reading because they are immediately given proof that they’ve read attentively when they pass the question checks. In this article, you can find information to help you understand why and how the questions appear in Sparx Reader and how they should feel like an extension of the story rather than an interruption to the reading process. 

The questions are carefully designed

We’ve put a lot of thought into writing our questions, so that they are easy to answer if the section has been read properly but aren’t easy to guess if the section has been skimmed or not read at all. For more information on how we design our questions, see our article: How are the questions designed? If the book is being read with care and precision, the questions won’t feel like an interruption. In fact, many students have reported that they find the opportunity to be asked these low-stakes questions an enjoyable one, and that their overall reading experience does not feel disrupted. 

They appear at suitable points 

We calibrate the frequency of the question checks carefully, to suit the typical working memory capacities of pupils with different reading ages. For pupils with low reading ages, their questions will occur more frequently so that they do not have to recall information from long sections of the book. For pupils with higher reading ages, their section lengths can be as long as 1,500 words before the questions appear.

They help us better understand and adapt to each student 

The information and insights provided by our readers’ responses to the questions are what shape our ever-evolving understanding of each individual student. From this data, we are able to: 

• Give teachers real-time updates regarding their pupils’ accuracy and how attentively and carefully they have been reading;
• Build a detailed picture of a student’s reading ability so that we know which books to offer to them;
• Keep track of the total amount of time students have spent doing meaningful reading.

The questions support readers to become more careful readers

We remove the text from view when the questions appear because we don’t want our readers to check the questions before reading the section. That would lead to a really unnatural and fragmented reading experience where students are scanning and searching for the answers to the questions, instead of concentrating on, and enjoying, the story. 

The questions and the vanishing text teach readers the habit of slowing down and reading in a focused, active and careful way.

The Sparx Reader questions help students practise paying attention. In today’s tech-heavy world, our young people are constantly skimming and scrolling and there is an urgent need to re-teach the habit of careful, controlled reading.