Accelerated Reader Question...

[Letustryagain]

Hi there,

I wonder if someone with experience of AR can help me.

My DD is in Year 3 and currently has an AR range of 3.0-4.6. In her particular school they start at the bottom of their range (when they first started AR) and then have to read a number of books at their level, achieve over 90% in every quiz and then move on to the next level. So for example, read three books at 3.3, get 90% or above in all three and then move to 3.4.

By doing this DD is now on level 4.9. She achieves 100% in all her quizzes but having doe a new Star test last week, is one of only a few in the class who have to redo it because her score wasn't high enough.

Has anyone else's child experienced this? She's worked her way up through the levels and always gets 100% in the quizzes but seems to struggle with the Star tests. She loves being read to but to be honest she's lazy when it comes to reading and I really have to force her to do it.

Do I just need to leave her to it and take the pressure off? What happens if the Star test she does tomorrow comes out with another low score? What will the school do?

Thank you.

4.9 is quite high for a Year 3 child. She will have been asked to redo the Star reading test if the results were substantially worse than her quiz reading level. Usually this turns out to be because the child was not focusing fully at the time of the test.
However, a few children do better on the quizzes because they have got into the books, and the questions are easier to understand . the Star reading tests are difficult from a vocabulary point of view, the topics of the questions can be very dull and outside the experience of a lot of children, and have an American bias, so unless a child is very motivated, they may not perform up to expectations.
The school is unlikely to do anything about the results. They can be used as an assessment tool, but usually other factors are taken into account as well when assessing reading ability. As your DD is reading well above the expected level for her age, I can't imagine they will do anything at all, unless her progress has halted. I suppose they could focus on comprehension more,but in most schools now children spend much more time doing comprehension than they did even 2 or 3 years ago.

Thank you for coming back to me. That has put my mind at ease. The issue that we have with DD is that she actually doesn't enjoy reading and is incredibly slow at it. I've raised this with the school before but because her comprehension is very good they haven't been concerned.

Up until now we've combatted the problem by reading the first chapter of her books to her so that she gets into the story and then she will take over from there, otherwise she would struggle to focus as because she's so slow, she gets bored.

I think I will probably just back off now and let her get on with it and see if, without us starting her off, her quiz scores remain at 100%... They are re-doing the Star test tomorrow for her and the others who didn't increase their scores from the last time they did it, so we'll see.

In our school they just accept the test and move people up where necessary but we don't move people down as it demotivates them.

Making her resit the star test might make her more nervous and still achieve the same grade as the last time.

We would brush it off, say they must have had an off day and move on. Comprehending the books they are reading is more important than the star test I believe in our school.

I agree with you Chunkyhare and she's already worried about resitting the test in case she gets the same result again (or worse...). Plus it's not as if she isn't capable as they have to work through every level within their range and must achieve 90%+ on 3 books at every point.

The school where I work do AR and they allow the children to choose any books from their range and only ask them to try a lower one if they're struggling with the quizzes. They then just periodically revisit the Star test. The schools all seem to work differently...