It is designed to monitor and manage students' independent reading practice and comprehension in both English and Spanish.
[4] Accelerated (going up to 7th grade) Reader (AR) quizzes are available on fiction and non-fiction books, textbooks, supplemental materials, and magazines.
The Renaissance Place version of Accelerated Reader also includes quizzes designed to practice vocabulary.
The results indicated that students in classrooms utilising the Accelerated Reader program showed academic gains.
It can only be concluded that the Renaissance program was highly effective in raising the performance of these elementary students.In 2003, Samuels and Wu found that after six months, third and fifth grade students who used Accelerated Reader demonstrated twice the gain in reading comprehension as those that did not use Accelerated Reader.
[14][15] Researcher Keith Topping completed many studies on Accelerated Reader that found the software to be an effective assessment for deciding curriculum.
[16][17] Renaissance Learning, the developer of Accelerated Reader, has outlined the primary purpose of the program as an assessment tool to gauge whether students have read a book,[5] not to assess higher-order thinking skills, to teach or otherwise replace curriculum, to supersede the role of the teacher, or to provide an extrinsic reward.
[18] Stephen D. Krashen, in a 2003 literature review, also asserts that reading incentives is one of the aspects of Accelerated Reader.
[19] Renaissance Place does include recognizing setting and understanding sequence as examples of higher-order thinking.
[20] Turner and Paris's study explore the role of classroom literacy tasks in which students take end-of-book tests called Reading Practice Quizzes that are composed of literal-recall questions to which there is only one answer.