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. The questions 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.

They are also intended 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.

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.

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.

The aim of the question timer is:

For these reasons, it is not possible to remove the timer for students. However, we have designed the timer to reduce this time pressure as much as possible:

There are several ways in which Sparx Reader supports lower-attaining students to increase their stores of background knowledge which, in turn, benefits their working memories: