Dr. Serafini,

I recently read your document entitled, “Accelerated Reader: A Position Statement.” Often times, people critical of Accelerated Reader (AR) expect the software to do more than it was ever designed to do. I respect your opinions on this issue. For that reason, I wanted to provide you with some current information about AR.

Accelerated Reader is a daily progress-monitoring assessment that helps educators carefully guide student’s independent reading practice. Teachers use the data captured by the assessment to monitor a student’s basic comprehension of books read and help guide him/her to a wide range of appropriate books. There are over 100,000 AR quizzes available for a variety of fiction and non-fiction books, magazines, and major textbook series.

Accelerated Reader is designed to evaluate whether a student read and understood a particular book at a basic level. Accelerated Reader relies on technology to do what it does best: collect, store, and report data while freeing up the teacher’s time to do what he/she does best: assess student’s deeper understanding of a book as a piece of literature.

Matching students to books is a complex process that consists of many different variables. Renaissance Learning offers educators several tools to help guide students to appropriate books but emphasizes the final decision is the responsibility of the student, librarian, teacher, and parent. For instance, the Accelerated Reader Goal Setting Chart is designed to help guide students to books written at levels that coincide with their estimated reading ability range. While this chart assists students and educators in selecting books, it is only one factor in the multifaceted process of determining whether a book is right for a student. The Goal Setting Chart operates in conjunction with a teacher’s expertise because no readability formula has the capacity to quantify a reader’s prior knowledge, conceptual understanding of a topic, motivation to read that particular book, or purpose for reading. Only a teacher can do this!

There are 26 experimental and quasi-experimental studies demonstrating the effectiveness of Accelerated Reader as a tool to monitor reading practice. Twenty-three of those studies have been conducted by independent researchers at Arizona State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Minnesota, the University of Memphis, etc. Furthermore, nine studies on Accelerated Reader have been published in peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, and Academic Exchange Quarterly. Reliability and validity data on Accelerated Reader quizzes are also available.

Feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss this information further.
Cheers,
Laurie Borkon
Renaissance Learning, Madison

Dear Laurie Borkon,

This is all nice advertisement information, but it does not change my opinion of this program. The assessments rely on literal recall, something I see having to do with memory and not thinking or comprehension. Matching books to readers is overrated. It focuses primarily on decoding and not on comprehension, regardless of the instrument or formula. Monitoring reading practice and assessing comprehension are two different things. If your company really wanted this program to be used as it was intended, then you would recall it from the schools that use it as a reading program, rather than a supplementary program, which I don’t see  you doing in the near future. Just because it sells doesn’t make it good. It is simply a tracking program based on minimal data and pretends to assess comprehension. Reliability and validity data don’t mean much when you don’t agree on the definition of reading and how reading or comprehension are operationalized in the study. And as far as research goes, I don’t see any top reading or ed psych journals listed above. AEQ and the others are not top literacy journals. I appreciate your position, as it seems you do mine, but I disagree that this program helps readers become better readers. I believe it is a behaviorist, token economy model that benefits those that already are readers by awarding points and prizes, and will result in failure because it is based purely on extrinsic motivation. I believe it sends the wrong message to young readers and is a minimalist vision of reading comprehension. There are plenty of limited assessment tools for comprehsnion available and I don’t think we need any more. Hope we can agree to disagree.
Frank

Dr. Frank Serafini
Assistant Professor - Literacy Education & Children’s Literature
University of Nevada, Las Vegas