Accelerated Reading Program

Accelerated Reader (AR) is software for K-12 schools for monitoring the practice of reading. It was created by Renaissance Learning, Inc. There are two versions: a desktop version and a web-based version in Renaissance Place, the company's online portal.

Accelerated Reader was designed to facilitate student reading growth through practice in an educational setting by:

The STAR (Standardized Test for the Assessment of Reading) test is a computer adaptive test designed to identify a student's grade-equivalent reading level and instructional reading level. This computer based test pulls questions from a bank based on prior student testing data or responses to prior test questions. The difficulty of questions is determined by prior correct answers or the score from a previous test. Types of questions students encounter are vocabulary (to include synonyms and antonyms), word structure (i.e., root words, prefixes and suffixes), analysis of passages to summarize, find main ideas, draw inferences or conclusions, make predictions and to discern author's purpose. A STAR test either gives 25 questions for the STAR Reading test or 34 questions for the STAR Reading Enterprise test. (The STAR Reading Enterprise test offers more in-depth reports and claims to have "greater sensitivity to test time" Students have 45-60 seconds to answer the first 10 questions and 90-120 seconds to answer the remaining questions depending on test version. Upon completion of the test, teachers may select a list of reports in order to view student testing data that can include a scaled score, percentile rank, grade equivalency, instructional reading level, domain scores, and a zone of and peace. STAR assessments

ATOS is a free to use readability formula, designed by Renaissance Learning, that is available at Renaissance Learning's website. Renaissance Learning claims that "ATOS is the first formula to include statistics from actual student book-reading (more than 30,000 students, reading almost 1,000,000 books), not just data based on short text passages."

Books with quizzes in Accelerated Reader are analyzed during the quiz creation process and assigned an ATOS readability level.

Accelerated Reader (AR) quizzes are available on fiction and non-fiction books, textbooks, supplemental materials, and magazines. Most are in the form of reading practice quizzes, although some are curriculum-based with multiple subjects.

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