Accel. Reader Program - good, bad & ugly

[Silly Little Pixie]

As a teacher, I love AR. I teach third grade, and my students use it daily. How we run it seems to be pretty different than a lot of the PPs' experiences, though.

1. We have a district-wide license, web-based. That frees us from the book having to be in the library's collection. Now, just about any book is on there. Really. So stuff from home, other libraries, Scholastic book orders, whatever... they can take a test. There's no required list. Reading is not a chore. I'll let kids read anything they want, but if they consistently fail tests out of level, I'll have them stick to their level until they start passing tests again.

2. We go by words, not by points. Each book has a word count. For example, a Junie B. Jones might be around 5,000 words, with Harry Potter around 100,000 or so. Kids don't have a goal they have to hit. There is no requirement. It's pretty motivating to most kids to say "I have 10,000 words" or "I'm almost to 100,000 words" than just say, 20 points. The words count if they pass the test with 60% or higher.

3. It's never a grade. It is not part of the reading program. It's an incentive program! Period. Every teacher uses it in different ways. Each teacher gives prizes for word counts as they see fit, or prize tickets to buy items in the class store.

4. Struggling readers- I have a LOT of success with them. It takes a lot of work on my part (and the student's) to find a series or type of book they like. They start out taking tests on books in the low end of their range. If they are still unsuccessful, they can have a buddy who IS a successful reader help them by reading the questions to them. If I read a book out loud to the class, they can test on that as well. Learning to read and comprehend questions about what they have read is critical. It's a skill, plain and simple, and they need to be taught how to recall the information so they can answer it.

I had 3 students this year get over 1,000,000 words read!! Their prize for a million words?
I got them each a stuffed Figment from WDW!!!!

 

[golfgal]

Oh boy, we hated AR. I'll never forget when we moved to this district and they put my daughter in the AR program. They made her read a few books that she was completely not interested in, so she didn't read them carefully and failed the tests. She was in fifth grade and at a second grade AR level because she failed the books she hated at the fifth grade level. Meanwhile, she was reading Harry Potter at home, which was quite a bit higher than fifth grade. Her idiot teacher actually told me I WASN'T ALLOWED to let her read Harry Potter at home! She told me my kid couldn't possibly understand what she was reading! I asked her to please let her test on the HP books and she said, NO. She refused to let her test on the books she was reading at home if they were not at her level. So I took it to the principal who allowed her to test on Harry Potter and guess what? She got 100% on each one. Suddenly her reading level was above all her classmates.

AR is just plain DUMB. It forces kids to stick to books only at their level. Never mind if they hate the books on the list. Never mind if they want to read "Goosebumps" and it's too low of an AR level or "Harry Potter" that's too high of an AR level. In my opinion, AR is designed to make a lot of kids despise reading. I had to really fight for my fifth grade daughter to have a right to prove she could read books more advanced than "See Jane Freaking Run."

This isn't a AR issue, it is a teacher/school issue. AR doesn't force kids to stay at their level, that was her teacher's doing. In our kids' school they could read any books they wanted to. Our kids tested on the Harry Potter books in 3rd grade and were reading the Lord of the Rings books in 4th grade. They also read Magic Tree House because they liked those books.

 

[Where'sPiglet?]

Our libraian says that has to do with the # of words in a book & how "big" the words are . We were talking about a book at was 4th grade but the subject matter was about 1st grade (and of course can't remember for the life of me what it was!)

Yes, that is pretty much how books are leveled. Sentence length, word size, word frequency, subject matter, font size, sentence patterning, etc is generally what is taken into account when leveling a book.

I still find some books in AR that seem to be "off" when you consider those types of things. There are several different book leveling systems, and there are charts that out there that show the correlation between systems. Sometimes (and I'm sure this happens in all systems) a book just seems to be leveled out of left field. Sometimes you will compare books of the same level and one just seems to be a mismatch.

It's not a huge or everyday problem with AR, just one I've noticed with some books.