Renaissance’s Accelerated Reader: Does It Really Work?

Abstract

The school library is an open place for students to learn, imagine, and be free to research information of their choosing. Renaissance’s Accelerated Reader is a reading level-based program that assigns point values to books when students pass the quiz assigned to each book. Accelerated Reader unfortunately promotes censorship and invasion of privacy due to how the program is structured. This paper examines the flaws with Accelerated Reader to help examine if the program is beneficial to students. The American Association of School Librarians’ position statement will be used to help emphasize the point of the paper being that Accelerated Reader is inefficient. Collaboration between school librarians and teachers would be more beneficial instead of computerized reading level programs. Accelerated Reader’s structure unfortunately causes censorship of materials and invasion of privacy for children’s reading choices.