Finding Success in AR

How to be Successful in Accelerated Reader (and like programs)

Achieving success in Accelerated Reader was as simple as opening the book, annotating every few pages, and taking the quiz aloud.

Caveat: This is useful for small groups of students who have shown significant struggles in reading comprehension and success on summative assessments due to language acquisition. The goal of this lesson plan is to illuminate the fact that co-learning can invigorate a student into becoming an independent lifelong learner.

Throughout the quarter, our class has utilized the Instructional Planning (IP) reports given by Renaissance Learning's reading comprehension assessments to introduce what their data results mean. We have used these reports to create small goals in overcoming key skills deficits that are keeping them from reaching grade level comprehension. Avenues such as Newsela informational texts as well as a fifth grade lexile level novel combine to provide focused articles, annotations, and assessments geared toward student specific key skills deficits (as per the IP report).

Used to facilitate concentrated close reading, the key skills deficits are the focal point of each student’s annotations. Every few pages students were instructed to stop reading, think about what they just read (aloud or silently), and write something that fell under the category of a key skill, like: figurative language, character development, situational context, cause and effect, how a character’s choices affects the outcome, et cetera. 

We kept it simple. The class read the novel in various ways: individually with music in headphones, whole class aloud with one reader at a time, small groups with one reader aloud, small groups with teacher only reading.

Having created no timeline for completing the task it was astonishing to find that the class members finished the book within the same 24 hour period of one another, only three school weeks upon starting to boot. Putting together a puzzle with my boys at home has taken more planning to reach an end goal. Beautifully perplexing this was for me.

On to the AR test.

Id est…

Process at-a-glance: Students read the questions aloud, then read the answers aloud for questions 1-5 out of 10. 

Quantitative outcomes at-a-glance: Students scored a 90%, or 9/10, each earning approximately 4 points for their AR.

Reflection at-a-glance: None of these students have been able to successfully earn that high on an AR test on more than one occasion throughout the year. This success gave them positive feelings. They absolutely loved seeing that 90% on the screen in front of them just as much as they did seeing the 4 points they earned.

The whole shebang (Process): One person reads the Q aloud, and one person each reads one of the four A’s aloud, for Q’s 1-5 only. Students share aloud each answer and discuss each answer’s validity. Narrow down to 50/50 and discuss the reasons why the first two were nixed. Forthwith, move on to discuss why the 50/50 were chosen to remain as valid possibilities. We discussed the subtleties of the “best” answer when two are very similar. We all agreed upon an answer with unanimity and successfully moved on. Sometimes we looked back in the book to confirm which, in fact, was easy because they had annotated while reading and could flip to that page quickly.  One answer was wrong because of a mis-remembered fact from the book. Unable to locate the fact, they agreed upon a logical conclusion. That is to be expected and can be used as a learning tool in the future, upon reflection.

Then for Q's 6-10 we read the Q aloud and then students hovered the cursor over the answer they thought was correct. I walked around and tapped their shoulder if correct, and, if not, I challenged them to prove why that answer was correct. Upon talking it out they realized without my saying so that their answer was almost correct but not quite the “best” answer.

We then all said the correct answer aloud. Out of 11 students anywhere from 7-10 were able to pick the correct answer on their own. Athletic Girl Student especially got every one of these five correct the first time as a milestone in her academic career. After the second Q, I came over to her, tapped her shoulder indicating a correct answer, and she beamed with pride and a wide smile. Emotional response to data is rewarding.