Accelerated Reading Program Has Many Great Benefits

By Marie Hamilton


Finding the best way to instill a love of books in children, is a challenge that many parents and teachers face. A student needs to become a fluent and independent reader. For over three decades, the Accelerated Reading program has been inciting youngsters to experience the joy of the written word, and giving adults a way to understand how to help them on that journey.

A mom who was searching for a way to help her children improve their comprehension and fluidity skills, developed the program in 1984. She would give them quick quizzes whenever they finished a book, as a way of finding out if they fully understood what they just read. In this way, she also came to realize there areas that were giving the kids trouble, and was able to focus on helping them resolve the problems.

The basic concept is for children to choose books that are on their level of competency, and read them independently. Upon completion, they take a short, computerized quiz of up to 10 questions that will test how well they comprehended the information that they read. The results are compiled into a report that the adult can utilize to see in which areas a particular student is struggling.

There are more than 180,000 quizzes currently available through this program and more are being added regularly. The titles included in the collection range in levels of difficulty to accommodate children in grades kindergarten through High School, are both fiction and nonfiction, covering a vast array genres and subject matter. There are tests that go along with certain textbooks and publications like magazines, as well.

A child's comprehension level is determined through an interactive computerized test lasting approximately 10 minutes. Their responses will cause the system to adjust the difficulty level to find the point of comprehension, called the ZPD, or zone of proximal development. Students can be reassessed periodically.

The quizzes typically tend to go with books that are commonly found in most school libraries, have received rave reviews, are written by popular authors, are volumes in trending series, have won awards, or have been requested by parents or teachers. They are given their ranking based on the number of words in them, and their difficulty level. A conversion scale is used to find the level for any titles that are not currently included on the list.

AR does not have its own set of incentives, though many libraries, parents, and teachers, have developed their own rewards system. Studies have found that when children have a goal to reach, they tend to be more excited and diligent about working to achieve it. This results in them practicing and honing their skills, and becoming proficient readers, while also finding out which subjects, or genres they prefer to read independently.

This is a fun and exciting way to get kids engaged in learning to read with enthusiasm. The short quizzes provided help both the student, and the adults, understand whether comprehension is fluid, or if a certain area requires additional attention. Earning points encourages the children to work towards a particular goal for incentive, or simply because they want to satisfy their own ambition, with the side effect of becoming better readers.




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