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Overview
Program Description1
Accelerated Reader™ is a guided reading intervention used to supplement regular reading instruction in K–12 classrooms. Its aim is to improve students’ reading skills through reading practice and quizzes on the books students read. The Accelerated Reader™ program calls for students to select and read a book and then take a computerized quiz based on the book’s content and vocabulary. The computer software then provides teachers with information on the students’ performance on the quiz, which allows teachers to monitor student progress and identify students who may need more reading assistance.
Research2
One study of Accelerated Reader™ that falls within the scope of the Adolescent Literacy review protocol meets What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards, and one study meets WWC evidence standards with reservations. The two studies included 2,877 students from grade 4 to grade 8 who attended elementary and middle schools in Oregon and Texas.3
Based on these two studies, the WWC considers the extent of evidence for Accelerated Reader™ on adolescent learners to be small for reading fluency and medium to large for comprehension. No studies that meet WWC evidence standards with or without reservations examined the effectiveness of Accelerated Reader™ on adolescent learners in the alphabetics or general literacy achievement domains.
Effectiveness
Accelerated Reader™ was found to have no discernible effects on reading fluency or comprehension for adolescent learners.
| Alphabetics | Reading fluency |
Comprehension | General literacy achievement | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rating of effectiveness | na |
No discernible effects | No discernible effects | na |
| Improvement index4
|
na |
Average: +7
percentile |
Average: +3 percentile points | na na |
1 The descriptive information for this program was obtained from a publicly available source: the program’s website (http://www.renlearn.com/ar/, downloaded August 2009). The WWC requests developers to review the program description sections for accuracy from their perspective. Further verification of the
accuracy of the descriptive information for this program is beyond the scope of this review. The literature search reflects documents publicly available
by July 2009.
2 The studies in this report were reviewed using WWC Evidence Standards, Version 2.0 (see the WWC Procedures and Standards Handbook, Chapter III), as described in protocol Version 2.0.
3 The evidence presented in this report is based on available research. Findings and conclusions may change as new research becomes available.
4 These numbers show the average and range of student-level improvement indices for all findings across the studies.