Accelerated Reading Programs use quizzes to measure reading skills in elementary and middle school children. The most popular program is Accelerated Reader, which collects statistics to judge book difficulty and student performance. Critics argue that the focus on recall rather than comprehension encourages cheating.
Accelerated Reading Programs are programs intended to quantify the reading skills of elementary and middle school children through regular testing. While there are several programs aimed at achieving this goal, by far the most popular is Accelerated Reader from Renaissance Learning, Inc. The programs are primarily based on quizzes and tests that students take after reading an assigned or chosen book. Quizzes are generally based on narrative events within the book rather than literary intricacies, such as themes and symbols. Books are usually rated on the difficulty they present to readers of a certain age and experience group.
Accelerated Reader’s accelerated reading program is especially notable because it collects statistics on those who take reading quizzes. These statistics can be used to make informed judgments about the difficulty level of a given book. If many children consistently struggle to do well on a quiz for a book, they are given a higher difficulty than books whose quizzes students do well on. Accelerated reading statistics can also be used for research purposes, allowing researchers and education policy specialists to compare student performance across different school districts and geographic areas. Such data can also be used to judge teacher performance, although this may not always be the case, as students often do their accelerated reading work independently.
While speed reading programs have proven useful, they have also come under some criticism. One aspect that critics find unsatisfactory is the fact that the programs tend to test the reader’s memory by asking questions about characters, setting and plot. They don’t tend to ask questions focused on understanding or on deeper themes. Advocates of accelerated reading programs argue that developing the ability to understand events and characters in books is an important first step in developing deeper analytical reading skills later in education.
The focus that accelerated reading places on recall versus comprehension makes cheating a major concern. There are many online resources that offer short, to-the-point summaries of the plot, setting, and characters in many different books. Students can use such resources to get all the information they need to pass a test without ever opening the book, and there’s no way to determine for sure that a student has actually read the book. The use of such summaries partially undermines the student benefit and statistical information obtained from the use of accelerated reading programs. Other forms of cheating, such as leafing through the book while taking the test, can be prevented through teacher supervision and the imposition of strict time limits on each question.
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