CURMUDGUCATION: Accelerated Reader's Ridiculous Research

CURMUDGUCATION: Accelerated Reader's Ridiculous Research:

Accelerated Reader's Ridiculous Research

If you are not familiar with Renaissance Learning and their flagship product, Accelerated Reader, count yourself lucky.

Accelerated Reading bills itself as a reading program, but it would be more accurate a huge library of reading quizzes, with a reading level assessment component thrown in. That's it. It doesn't teach children how to read; it just puts them in a computerized Skinner box that feeds them points instead of pellets for performing some simple tasks repeatedly.

Pick a book (but only one on the approved AR list). Read it. As soon as you've read it, you can take the computer quiz and earn points. AR is a great demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences as well as Campbell's Law, because it ends up teaching students all sorts of unproductive attitudes about reading while twisting the very reading process itself. Only read books on the approved list. Don't read long books-- it will take you too long to get to your next quiz to earn points. If you're lagging in points, pick short books that are easy for you. Because the AR quizzes are largely recalling questions, learn what superficial features of the book to read for and skip everything else. And while AR doesn't explicitly encourage it, this is a program that lends itself easily to other layers of abuse, like classroom prizes for hitting certain point goals. Remember kids-- there is no intrinsic reward or joy in reading. You read only so that somebody will give you a prize.

While AR has been adopted in a huge number of classrooms, it's not hard to find folks who do not love it. Look at some articles like "3  Reasons I Loathe Accelerated Reader" or "Accelerated Reader: Undermining Literacy While Undermining Library Budgets" or "Accelerated Reader Is Not a Reading Program" or "The 18 Reasons Not To Use Accelerated Reader." Or read Alfie Kohn's "A Closer Look at Reading Incentive Programs." So, a wide consensus that the Accelerated Reading program gets some very basic things wrong about reading.

But while AR sells itself to parents and schools as a reading program, it also does a huge amount of work as a data mining operation. Annually the Renaissance people scrape together the data that they have mined through AR and they issue a report. You can get at this year's report by way of this website.

The eyebrow raising headline from this year's report is that a mere 4.7 minutes of reading per day separate the reading stars from the reading goats. Or, as US News headlined it, "Just a Few More Minutes Daily May Help Struggling Readers Catch Up." Why, that's incredible. So incredible that one CURMUDGUCATION: Accelerated Reader's Ridiculous Research: