What's a Smarticle?
Smarter articles. Smarter questions. Smarter readers.
- February 17, 2016
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
― Christopher Hitchens
Smarticles. What are they, you ask? Smarticles are interactive articles on SmartyReader, an educational eReader app for high school students, capitalizing on award-winning content from the New York Times, Atlantic, and Financial Times. Aligned with the content on the SAT & ACT, SmartyReader incorporates argumentative writing about recent developments in social sciences, humanities, and natural science. As such, students acquire essential critical reading and grammar skills while simultaneously engaging with fresh insights into topics relevant to today’s world.
When you first open a Smarticle, you will discover several cool and useful features. Like a Kindle, SmartyReader allows you to double-click a word you’re unfamiliar with to view its definition. SmartyReader takes this functionality one step further by allowing you to save the word, its surrounding context, and its definition to your personalized Flashcard Stack. After saving as many words as you like, just head over to Flashcard Stack tool to review those unfamiliar words!
As you are reading a Smarticle, you will also notice question marks beside each paragraph. Simply click on the icon and multiple choice questions will appear about that paragraph. The questions are NOT easy and, like SmartyReader’s content, are designed to reflect the exact logic and difficulty of reading and writing questions on the SAT and ACT.
Smarticles use an algorithm that tracks how well you are performing and uses this information to customize the difficulty level of the Smarticles you encounter in your library. You also get to see the average performance of all SmartyReader users on each Smarticle. A good place to start is by focusing on beating the curve. Continued use, however, is key to making your critical reading and writing abilities skyrocket. If you do, you’ll join hundreds of SmartyReader users who have seen a 100+ point boost on the reading and writing sections of the SAT!