Why does the text disappear when students are answering questions?

After a student has read a section of their book on Sparx Reader, the text vanishes and a series of multiple choice questions appears. If we are going to train our young people to slow down and read really carefully, the most effective way to do that is to remove the text from view before posing questions about it. 

We don’t want our readers to check the questions before reading the section because that leads to a really unnatural and disconnected reading experience where they might be scanning for the answers instead of concentrating on, and enjoying, the story. The removal of the text is a barrier to skim-reading (we accept that skimming is of course a hugely important and difficult skill, but this is not the reading habit that Sparx Reader intends to develop). We want students to be engaged in the cognitive act of reading and processing while reading, and to gain a good impression of the story.

That’s also why our questions are straightforward: we’re not asking our readers to remember any really specific details that they could easily miss. We also make sure that pupils who find reading hard don’t have to read and remember too much before they get asked questions.

Episodic Memories and Situation Models 

The experience of reading a book is not he same as learning per se; it is more the case that the reader receives an impression of the text’s events and creates an ‘episodic’ memory, which is much more tethered to the emotional and sensory context of the events. Therefore the questions we ask on Sparx Reader are not designed to lead to LTM storage of individual sentences and lines, but are there to help students focus, slow down and build a mental representation of the book as they read. 

Some colleagues might know this type of mental representation as a ‘situation model’ of a text; readers update their situation model by relinquishing the details that are less important, while maintaining those that are essential (Such, 2021). Our questions support students to create situation models by focusing on the most salient details of the story. They are quick and simple 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. The questions only focus on the main aspects of the story that a reader should naturally remember if they are going to be able to follow the whole book’s events. Further, our questions support students to know what in particular to attend to as they read. When the text is removed, the central impression of the section they’ve just read should be retained, and this is what the questions are designed to assess.

So, the Sparx Reader experience helps 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 and controlled reading.