“We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.”
Brian Cox
What is AR?
Accelerated Reader, usually known as AR, is a program designed for students and educators to speed up learning.
AR is one of the most popular programs in the world for grades 1-12. Students can earn points by taking and passing quizzes on books that they have read. Points depend on the difficulty of the book, and how many questions there are.
Why do we use AR?
At Shooting Star, we chose to use the AR program because we believe that it has many specific benefits for our students.
The program assesses the readability of a text by looking at four factors:
Average Sentence Length + Average Word Length + Vocabulary Grade Level
+ The Number of Words in a Book
This is compared to Lexile® which looks at two factors to determine readability.
Sentence Length + Word Frequency
How does this program help students and parents?
A great use of this score that this program provides us with is a tool that can guide students and parents to books that are most suitable to read. As students take quizzes, we begin to get data about how well the children are understanding the books. It’s not possible for children to tell us what they don’t know, so taking these short quizzes exposes them to new vocabulary, and allows us, as teachers, to assess the information we’ve collected to help further the student’s education.
We hope you found this information useful. If you have any questions, please feel free to send us a message.