A mid-year look at Accelerated Reader

I thought it might be useful to post links to two on-line articles about implementing Accelerated Reader in the classroom in an effort to better inform our practice, and insure that we are best serving our students.
Both articles are sponsored by the International Reading Association, and take two different points of view.
The first is by Keith Topping- " Formative Assessment of Reading Comprehension by Computer: Advantages and Disadvantages of The Accelerated Reader Software " Professor Topping concentrates on best practices:

The characteristics of good implementation suggested by the Sanders and Topping (1999) report described under Research on The Accelerated Reader imply that teachers should do the following:

* Have students read as much as possible -- but guide those above fifth grade away from reading a large number of very easy books
* Monitor student progress carefully
* Check that students' percentage of correct answers is at 85 percent or higher
* Generate and study at-risk reports
* Intervene when the above goals are not being met -- especially with low ability students, and probably also with high ability students
* Increase the challenge level slowly and gradually
* Monitor carefully to ensure that challenge does not become so great as to begin to depress percentage of correct answers

Experience suggests that to these might be added the following general guidelines to good implementation:

* Teachers should be trained in implementation
* Participation must be voluntary for students
* There should be a large number of AR books available for students to choose from
* Books should be coded for readability to enable students to manage challenge on their own
* Extra opportunities for reading practice should be provided at school (in and out of class) and encouraged at home and in the community
* Student access to computers for the purposes of AR test taking should be easy, frequent, and immediate
* Students should be encouraged to reflect on the implications for action provided by the feedback they receive, with self-management encouraged
* Less able readers should be permitted to test on books read to and with them, as should their peer helpers
* Parents should be aware of the program, regularly receive AR reports from the school and respond to them, and be encouraged to ensure that their children have opportunities to read at home
* Peer tutoring should be incorporated, in support of reading, testing, or both
* Extrinsic rewards should be used only if necessary, effective, and culturally appropriate, and then the rewards offered should be books or reading-related items
* Retesting should be allowed only in exceptional circumstances
* Criteria for “Model Classroom” status should be met (even if certification is not applied for)

Practitioners might want to create a checklist for self-assessment of AR implementation quality in their own school by printing these points or copying and pasting them into a word-processing

The second is by Linda Labbo- "Questions Worth Asking about The Accelerated Reader: A Response to Topping". From her introduction:

I agreed to write this response primarily because, after reading Topping's commentary, I agreed with his observation: “Like any other educational tool, how it [AR] is used might be more important than if it is used.” It is interesting to note that much of the research Topping cites as evidence of the effectiveness of the AR program is based more on studies that look at if it is used rather than how. It is clear that statistical analyses of large-scale standardized-test scores from schools where AR is used provide interesting data; however, such studies do not shed light on the myriad, uncontrolled-for variables within the cultural context of a classroom or school.

In schools across the United States, educators are involved in multiple initiatives intended to do everything from integrate computers into the curriculum to decrease the potential for school violence. The Accelerated Reader may be perceived by some as an easy way simultaneously to meet goals related to computer use, to support students' development of reading comprehension, and to improve scores on standardized reading tests. The purpose of this article is to raise some questions worth asking about the AR program and to highlight the importance of studying how it is used.

Linda takes a more critical view of the effectiveness of A/R:

Educators, parents, business partners, and administrators wonder if the AR program is consistently effective in helping meet goals in these areas. For a program whose design is intended to free teachers from spending time and effort reading children's book reports, from keeping logs of books children have read, and from scoring comprehension questions about those books (How AR Works, 1995), it appears to cause many teachers to spend a great deal of time and effort on figuring out how to achieve “good” program implementation.

Between the two articles, every issue that any staff member has raised about Accelerated Reader is touched upon.

Fads in Education-here's an example

The New York Times has an article describing a new fad among Japanese parents: Indian Education. This makes me laugh, because I remember all the discussions(still going on Today, I might add)various pundits have had about the faults of our educational system versus the virtues of Japanese teaching techniques.

January 2, 2008
Losing an Edge, Japanese Envy India’s Schools
By MARTIN FACKLER

MITAKA, Japan — Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected: a growing craze for Indian education.

Despite an improved economy, many Japanese are feeling a sense of insecurity about the nation’s schools, which once turned out students who consistently ranked at the top of international tests. That is no longer true, which is why many people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.

Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan.

And Japan’s few Indian international schools are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.

At the Little Angels English Academy & International Kindergarten, the textbooks are from India, most of the teachers are South Asian, and classroom posters depict animals out of Indian tales. The kindergarten students even color maps of India in the green and saffron of its flag.

Little Angels is located in this Tokyo suburb, where only one of its 45 students is Indian. Most are Japanese.

Viewing another Asian country as a model in education, or almost anything else, would have been unheard-of just a few years ago, say education experts and historians.

Much of Japan has long looked down on the rest of Asia, priding itself on being the region’s most advanced nation. Indeed, Japan has dominated the continent for more than a century, first as an imperial power and more recently as the first Asian economy to achieve Western levels of economic development.

But in the last few years, Japan has grown increasingly insecure, gripped by fear that it is being overshadowed by India and China, which are rapidly gaining in economic weight and sophistication. The government here has tried to preserve Japan’s technological lead and strengthen its military. But the Japanese have been forced to shed their traditional indifference to the region.

Grudgingly, Japan is starting to respect its neighbors.

“Until now, Japanese saw China and India as backwards and poor,” said Yoshinori Murai, a professor of Asian cultures at Sophia University in Tokyo. “As Japan loses confidence in itself, its attitudes toward Asia are changing. It has started seeing India and China as nations with something to offer.”

Last month, a national cry of alarm greeted the announcement by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that in a survey of math skills, Japan had fallen from first place in 2000 to 10th place, behind Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea. From second in science in 2000, Japan dropped to sixth place.

While China has stirred more concern here as a political and economic challenger, India has emerged as the country to beat in a more benign rivalry over education. In part, this reflects China’s image in Japan as a cheap manufacturer and technological imitator. But India’s success in software development, Internet businesses and knowledge-intensive industries in which Japan has failed to make inroads has set off more than a tinge of envy.

Most annoying for many Japanese is that the aspects of Indian education they now praise are similar to those that once made Japan famous for its work ethic and discipline: learning more at an earlier age, an emphasis on memorization and cramming, and a focus on the basics, particularly in math and science.

India’s more demanding education standards are apparent at the Little Angels Kindergarten, and are its main selling point. Its 2-year-old pupils are taught to count to 20, 3-year-olds are introduced to computers, and 5-year-olds learn to multiply, solve math word problems and write one-page essays in English, tasks most Japanese schools do not teach until at least second grade.

Indeed, Japan’s anxieties about its declining competitiveness echo the angst of another nation two decades ago, when Japan was the economic upstart.

“Japan’s interest in learning from Indian education is a lot like America’s interest in learning from Japanese education,” said Kaoru Okamoto, a professor specializing in education policy at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.

As with many new things here, the interest in Indian-style education quickly became a fad.

Indian education is a frequent topic in forums like talk shows. Popular books claim to reveal the Indian secrets for multiplying and dividing multiple-digit numbers. Even Japan’s conservative education ministry has begun discussing Indian methods, said Jun Takai of the ministry’s international affairs division.

Eager parents try to send their children to Japan’s roughly half dozen Indian schools, hoping for an edge on the competitive college entrance exams.

In Tokyo, the two largest Indian schools, which teach kindergarten through junior high, mainly to Indian expatriates, received a sudden increase in inquiries from Japanese parents starting last year.

The Global Indian International School says that 20 of its some 200 students are now Japanese, with demand so high from Indian and Japanese parents that it is building a second campus in the neighboring city of Yokohama.

The other, the India International School in Japan, just expanded to 170 students last year, including 10 Japanese. It already has plans to expand again.

Japanese parents have expressed “very, very high interest” in Indian schools, said Nirmal Jain, principal of the India International School.

The boom has had the side effect of making many Japanese a little more tolerant toward other Asians.

The founder of the Little Angels school, Jeevarani Angelina — a former oil company executive from Chennai, India, who accompanied her husband, Saraph Chandar Rao Sanku, to Japan in 1990 — said she initially had difficulty persuading landlords to rent space to an Indian woman to start a school. But now, the fact that she and three of her four full-time teachers are non-Japanese Asians is a selling point.

“When I started, it was a first to have an English-language school taught by Asians, not Caucasians,” she said, referring to the long presence here of American and European international schools.

Unlike other Indian schools, Ms. Angelina said, Little Angels was intended primarily for Japanese children, to meet the need she had found when she sent her sons to Japanese kindergarten.

“I was lucky because I started when the Indian-education boom started,” said Ms. Angelina, 50, who goes by the name Rani Sanku here because it is easier for Japanese to pronounce. (Sanku is her husband’s family name.)

Ms. Angelina has adapted the curriculum to Japan with more group activities, less memorization and no Indian history. Encouraged by the kindergarten’s success, she said, she plans to open an Indian-style elementary school this year.

Parents are enthusiastic about the school’s rigorous standards.

“My son’s level is higher than those of other Japanese children the same age,” said Eiko Kikutake, whose son Hayato, 5, attends Little Angels. “Indian education is really amazing! This wouldn’t have been possible at a Japanese kindergarten.”