When used casually, AR helps students’ reading abilities grow. When used thoughtfully and with proven techniques, it leads to tremendous gains and a lifelong love of reading. - Getting Results with Accelerated Reader, Renaissance Learning
I am currently reading aloud Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce to my 10 year old son. It is an interesting "what if" story: the main character and his older brother find a bag of money thrown off of a train in England. The problem is that England's currency is soon transitioning from pounds to the euro. To add a wrinkle to the narrative, the main character's mother recently passed away. To add another wrinkle, the main character can speak to deceased saints canonized within the Catholic Church. This story is nothing if not interesting and hard to predict.
Reading aloud to my son sometimes leads to conversations about other books. For instance, I asked him about a fantasy series that also seemed to stretch one's imagination. I thought it was right up his alley. Yet he declined. Pressed to explain why, my son finally admitted that he didn't want to read that series because he failed an Accelerated Reader quiz after reading the first book. Here is our conversation:
Me: "When did you read the book in that series?"
Son: "Back at my older school."
Me: "Why did you take a quiz on it?"
Son: "Because we had to take at least one quiz every month."
Me: "Did you not understand the book?"
Son: "I thought I did. It was hard, but I liked it."
This is an educational fail. When an assessment such as Accelerated Reader causes a student to not want to read, this should be a cause for concern. To be clear, Accelerated Reader is an assessment tool designed to measure reading comprehension. Yet it is not a valid tool for driving instruction. What Works Clearinghouse, a source for existing research on educational programming, found Accelerated Reader to have "mixed effects on comprehension and no discernible effects on reading fluency for beginning readers." In other words, if a school were to implement Accelerated Reader, they should expect to find results that were not reliable, with the possibility of no impact on student learning. Consider this as you ponder other approaches to promoting independent reading.
It should also be noted that none of the studies listed took a look at the long term effects of using Accelerated Reader on independent reading. That would make for an interesting study.
I realize that it makes simple sense to quiz a student about their comprehension after reading a book. Why not? The problem is, when a student sees the results of said quiz, they appear to attribute their success or failure to their abilities as a reader. Never mind that the text might have been boring and only selected because of points, that the test questions were poorly written, that the teacher had prescribed the text to be read and tested without any input from the student, or that the test results would be used toward an arbitrary reading goal such as points. Any one of these situations may have skewed the results. In addition, why view not passing an AR quiz as a failure? It might be an opportunity to help the student unpack their reading experience in a constructive way.
What if a failed AR test was viewed not as a failure but as data about reading comprehension? Why is it so critical that kids “pass”?
— Matt Renwick (@ReadByExample) January 5, 2017
What I would say is to take a step back from independent reading, and to appreciate it as a whole. What are we trying to do with this practice? Independent reading, as the phrase conveys, means to develop a habit of and love for lifelong, successful reading. This means the appropriate skills, strategies and dispositions should be developed with and by students. Any assessment that results in a student not wanting to read more interferes with that process and causes more problems than benefits. The Hippocratic Oath in medicine states "Do no harm". Sounds like wisdom education should heed as well.
Suggestion for further reading: My Memory of The Giver by Dylan Teut