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Check this Out!: What ARe They Reading?
By Marie Ann Donovan
Document: Column
Introductory Paragraph: Chances are many a reader of this column will recall spending time in school with Renaissance Learning’s Accelerated Reader (AR) program. Designed initially over 40 years ago as a resource for fostering children’s continued independent engagement with books, AR morphed into a suite of school products that teach (e.g., Freckle, Flocabulary, Nearpod) and assess (e.g., Star, FastBridge) reading and provide or connect students to books and other texts (e.g., myON). Over the last year, the school librarian national blogosphere has been lighting up with reports about schools investing in or expanding their AR programs. Mostly critical of its adoption or ongoing use, librarians’ posts expressed frustration over limited school budgets being redirected to supporting classroom teachers’ use of AR rather than to expanding library collections and librarian programming beyond that developed to support using AR. Librarians also felt their expertise in curating and sharing appropriate titles for independent reading with students was being ignored by school stakeholders wholly focused on whether any given library book was on the AR quiz list. Many librarians lamented that once AR was adopted by their schools, their role was relegated to being merely an AR book distributor and reading monitor, to paraphrase one anonymous blog post. During communications for this column with teachers and librarians in schools where AR is a substantial component of the total reading instruction program, patterns of misunderstanding and disagreement among them emerged. For some educators, deciding to adopt and use AR must be within the strict purview of classroom teachers, who are ultimately responsible for students’ reading achievement—not librarians, even when students use the school library’s collection of AR-related materials. Other educators argued that given the AR program requires students to access a considerable number of books beyond those in a typical classroom library, and each student needs an educator to “check in” with after finishing an AR book and its quiz, they felt the AR adoption decision and implementation responsibilities must be assumed jointly by teachers, librarians, and administrators. As the use of AR appears to be increasing nationally (and internationally), understanding AR’s purpose, how it works, and school stakeholders’ roles in mounting an AR-based independent reading program no doubt will inform any conversations about AR that you might become part of at your school.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33600/IRCJ.54.3.2026.65
Page Numbers: 65-71
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