How are the questions designed?

The questions in Sparx Reader are basic, fact-retrieval questions 

The questions do not address higher-order thinking skills, such as inference, analysis, evaluation or comparison. The questions on Sparx Reader are basic, fact-retrieval questions that should feel like an extension of the story for the reader, minimising disruption to their reading flow. We leave teaching the more complex thinking skills to the experts in the classroom; instead, we provide visibility of whether a pupil has read their book carefully and how well they have understood the key plot points.

We want students to be engaged in the deliberate act of reading in order to gain a good impression of the story and so while the questions are not necessarily designed to lead to complete memorisation of the narrative, they are there to build episodic memories. The main thrust of the question design is to help students to focus and to slow down their reading.

These questions occur at frequent, natural breaks 

For pupils with a low reading age the question checks can be as often as every 50-100 words, whereas for pupils with a high reading age, they can be approximately every 1000-1500 words. It is also worth noting that novice readers will see fewer questions at each check than those with higher reading ages. 

The questions are easy to pass if you have read carefully 

The questions are carefully designed so that they should be easy for the reader to pass if they have read the text carefully. This is because they are based on the most important events, characters and themes that surfaced in the previous section. 

They are there to support readers and build good habits 

The questions are designed to scaffold the reading process for students, as they build a store of background knowledge about the book to draw on when they encounter new details, forming a coherent mental model of the book. The questions reinforce key concepts in the narrative and help students pay attention to, and reflect on, important details in the text. This in turn enables them to integrate new ideas and knowledge into their growing impression and understanding of the book.

To scaffold the process by supporting students’ memories, many of the questions paraphrase some of the plot in the form of a prompt before posing the question, for example:

The questions are appropriate to the student's reading level

It is important to know that the language used in the questions is pitched at the same level as the text itself so will be accessible to the student. 

At most checks in books with a reading age of 9+, there will be one question that is ‘Not in story’, designed as an alternative way to check for understanding, to see if the student is reading carefully, as well as to add interest and variety to the process. 

However, for books with a low reading age (5-6), we do not always include a ‘Not in story’ option. We are mindful of managing these readers’ cognitive loads, and for novice readers, it isn’t always appropriate, efficient or helpful to include this option within the multiple-choice question structure. Instead, we vary the nature of the questions by providing gap-fill options that are verbatim to the text, still in a multiple-choice format:

In addition, in lower-level books (reading age 5-7), the distractors are all lifted from the text itself so that the novice reader’s working memory isn’t overloaded with yet more new information at the question stage.