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Comprehensive Assessment of Reading Strategies

The CARS® Series

Get the Data You Need to Drive Instruction and Measure Progress

The research-based Comprehensive Assessment of Reading Strategies (CARS) series helps educators identify students' strengths and weaknesses in the 12 standards-based reading skills.

  • Pretest, benchmark tests, and post test cover a range of genres.
  • Longer reading passages are followed by selected-response questions.
  • Series includes tracking forms/charts for teachers and self-assessment forms for students.
  • Use results to target instruction with the STARS® instructional series.

Get to Know CARS

Grades K–8

CARS focuses on the 12 key reading strategies to improve students' reading ability: finding main ideas, recalling facts and details, understanding sequence, recognizing cause and effect, comparing and contrasting, making predictions, finding word meaning in context, drawing conclusions and making inferences, distinguishing fact from opinion, identifying author's purpose, interpreting figurative language, and summarizing.

Comprehensive Assessment of Reading Strategies book.

Student Book

Each Student Book includes a Pretest, a Post Test, five Benchmark tests, and two self-assessment forms. Books are available in Levels A–H (Grades K–8) in English and Levels K–E (Grades 1–5) in Spanish. 

Download a free sample lesson:

Comprehensive Assessment of Reading Strategies Teacher Guide.

Teacher Guide

Teacher Guides include reproducible answer forms to make recordkeeping easier and facilitate instructional planning. There is a corresponding Teacher Guide for every Student Book.

Download a free sample lesson:

Proven to Work

The Educational Research Institute of America completed a study of the instructional effectiveness of CARS and STARS.

READ THE STUDY

Backed by Research

The CARS series is founded on research-based strategies and features that are designed to support students as they learn to read for meaning.

READ THE RESEARCH

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