Accelerated Reader, or AR, has had some mixed reviews throughout Henrico County. With the county no longer paying for the quizzes I feel like the topic has been coming up more as well. Some teachers believe that AR is a great way to motivate those students who are reluctant to read, but love competition or need a little push to get started. I’ve seen this to be true, but at the same time some of the questions are not always indicative of comprehension. There are some questions that are absurdly specific that have little to nothing to do with the plot of the story that trip students up. For example, the color of a character’s sweater in a book with hundreds of pages.
Instead of just letting AR fade away, or figuring out a way to pay for the service, Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s students at Short Pump Elementary School had a better idea. They studied Bloom’s Taxonomy and learned how to ask questions that target different levels of knowledge and comprehension. The students then took their new knowledge and applied that to a book they had just read.
We decided that the best way to really get the most accomplished with these quizzes was by the students creating Google Forms for the books, and then using Flubaroo to grade the quiz. Since we were using Flubaroo the questions had to be multiple choice to be the most accurate, which made their job a little more difficult.
The students finished their first round of quizzes, and did a fantastic job! Our plan is to get a bank of quizzes and roll them out to the fourth grade. Once we have the whole grade level on board we can extend it school wide, and even further. We are planning on putting them on a blog or website where students from all over the country or even the world could come and take the quizzes.
 |
 |
