By: Jayden Presley, Vallo Vision News
The Accelerated Reader Program, used in many K-12 public education systems, generates mixed responses and experiences from UM students and teachers.
Educator Judi Paul developed the idea for the AR Renaissance Learning Program in 1984. It became used by schools across America in 1998, shifting to the web version in 2006 to store and access online quizzes.
Renaissance Learning released a new version of the program in 2014, called Accelerated Reader 360. Before program changes occurred, several generations of students in the U.S. went through the program from elementary to middle school.
According to the Renaissance Special Report 2017 statistics, students in middle school who participated in AR had 5% higher reading growth compared to students who did not.
High school students who participated in AR had an 8% higher reading growth compared to students who did not.
Paul began the program as a motivator for her four children to read more books in the summer months. But for some UM students, like Gabriel Talley, the program has flaws.
“To me, it’s a program geared toward helping elementary school students who are proficient in one skill set or another. It’s in the same vein as the gifted program that schools have; it’s just more geared toward reading obviously. If I could brush over it, I would,” Talley said.
The program categorizes students into reading levels and incentivizes reading with a points system. The higher level the books, the more points they are worth, depending on how well a student scores on a quiz.
“Initially, I had this burst of excitement when I was in Accelerated Reading, because I felt like reading was the only thing I was good at,” said Talley, a senior English major.
When first tested for the AR program, he placed at a college reading level while in elementary school.
“Really, all it gave me was a division from the rest of my classmates because I didn’t have that many points of relation with the people around me to begin with. Kids are kind of insidious because they don’t really have the filter in their brains to know this is something they shouldn’t say,” Talley said.
AR puts a number on something that I don’t feel like you should quantify. Accelerated Reading should be used to identify what a kid likes.
Gabriel Talley
He says the program became too competitive. He witnessed his friends battle to read the most books, and teachers would display students’ names on a list of who had the most AR points.
He reached a time in his life when he couldn’t read books for enjoyment.
“I lost a lot of my love for it, I think. It trains you in a lot of ways subconsciously to think ‘even though I’m good at this, socially it doesn’t bring me a lot of success.’ It doesn’t make my social life any better,” Talley said.
He says he already felt singled out in school, and AR singled him out more. It became hard for him to define himself.
Talley said: “I went to a school that was 99.99999% white. And so, I was already kind of used to the look of discovery. That’s basically when a white kid is looking at you, they’re like, ‘I’ve never seen anyone who looks like that before in my life.’ They’re not thinking, ‘Who are you?’ They think, ‘What are you?’”
Senior English major Meredith Mosley also says her teachers would display the AR points of students in the classroom. She says this practice harms students who struggle with reading.
“I was normally on that list of top 5 or top 10, and it felt great for me, but I know that some of my classmates probably did not feel great. Maybe they never made the list in their entire elementary school. I can’t imagine what that would do to a child’s self-esteem and sense of self,” she said.
Despite some of the problems she saw within the program, Mosley experienced AR in a positive way. She attended a Christian elementary school that encouraged students to read as much as they wanted.
Her teachers pushed her to read beyond her reading level. She says it encouraged her to select books from a variety of authors and genres and was a building block for her personality.
“The benefits for us were motivating us to read because without those incentives, I feel like none of us would have read as much as we did. For me, especially. Here I am an English major,” said Mosley.
She says teachers should not make AR a requirement for students since not everyone likes to read.
“It’s kind of a mixed bag because reading is something that is essential to your elementary learning. At the same time, if you don’t want to go to the library every day and get five books and read them, you shouldn’t have to,” said Mosley.
Talley says there are many kids who are not interested in reading long novels, but they will read comic books or graphic novels. He says AR needs to diversify and expose kids to different things to read.
“AR puts a number on something that I don’t feel like you should quantify. Accelerated Reading should be used to identify what a kid likes. What kind of reading to they like? What excites them when they read? What energizes them?” he said.
According to The Nation’s Report Card, Alabama reading scores did not show a significant change for students in the eighth grade between 2005-2019. Over 36 states either had no change or decreased in their average reading scores for the eighth grade.
Dr. Tammy Cook is a professor and program coordinator for the secondary education program at UM’s Department of Education. Her doctorate is in curriculum instruction, and she has taught for 13 years at UM. Before UM, she taught high school English at Madison Academy in Huntsville for 10 years and taught junior high when AR was introduced in the 1990s.
“When I started teaching, I realized that a lot of my students had really negative experiences with it,” she said.
She says her students in graduate school remembered they first loved AR since they were able to read books they would not normally read. When it became punishing for them, they lost interest.
Cook recalled a time as a junior high teacher when one of her colleagues incorporated test grades with AR. The teacher would require her students to get 100 points by the end of the year to get the full grade.
“If they were only able to achieve 60 points, that was like getting a D or an F for something beyond their control if they weren’t avid readers or were struggling with it,” said Cook.
She says AR became more penalizing than an incentive for students. Parents would call and say they didn’t want their children to hate reading.
Cook says experts advise teachers to figure out what kind of reading a student is most interested in and go from there to improve reading skills.
“If they’re having reading problems and they don’t understand things like contextual cues, or they don’t understand some of the vocabulary, then they become very disheartened. They start losing focus and interest in doing it,” Cook said.
Cook disagrees with teachers who display AR points in the class, saying it is a poor reflection of the teachers’ sensitivity toward group pressure. Some children try hard to get their names at the top of the list but certain boundaries may keep them from it.
“If they are using it for a grade, it’s just like them putting the grades up about what students made on a test. It’s proven it can do psychological damage to children when they’re struggling academically. It can make them go backwards rather than forwards,” said Cook.
AR is designed to help students with comprehension, and Cook says students should read around their reading levels to practice.
Reading is something that is essential to your elementary learning. At the same time, if you don’t want to go to the library every day and get five books and read them, you shouldn’t have to.
Meredith Mosley
“A teacher who is very supportive and in tune with what [students] are reading, what they’re choosing, where they may be struggling, looking to see what books they may be struggling with and trying to help those students, then [AR] becomes a tool,” she said.
Cook says she believes students should read within their reading levels, even if the AR test says a fifth-grade student can read on a ninth-grade level.
She says AR should change for students who are beyond the sixth-grade level. Older students become more involved and have less time to read on their own. Cook says she thinks students should not be penalized by AR when they reach middle school and high school, especially when English classes require more reading.
To learn more about AR’s effectiveness in schools, read the 2016 WWC Intervention Report by the U.S. Department of Education.
Vallo Vision News 