Letters

Readers Weigh in on Accelerated Reader and Reading Counts

Concerning The Article "The Great Debate: Do Accelerated Reader and Reading Counts Work?" (September 2001), your cover says it all. While educators debate the effectiveness of these programs, the students are all reading. Enough said!

Kathleen E. Wildonger, Librarian
Springhouse Middle School
Allentown, PA

With much interest i've just read the latest cover story about Accelerated Reader (AR) and Reading Counts (RC), but I found Ms. Chenoweth's article incomplete and inconclusive. There are so many more ways that AR and RC are being used in schools than the narrow view which Ms. Chenowith took. I believe that the majority of schools with these programs are using them as one of their tools in reading instruction, rather than the "be-all and end-all." We educators are smarter than that! If there's one single program that can do a complete and effective job of teaching reading, we'd all surely like to know what it is.

I've been a proponent of first Electronic Bookshelf [an earlier version of RC] and now Reading Counts for nearly 10 years as a middle school teacher and media specialist. It has made a real difference in getting books into children's hands and encouraging them to read—both those who wouldn't do so otherwise and those who would have done it on their own. At my school, RC is used in conjunction with SRA (Science Research Associates) reading instruction.

Another point that Chenowith should have made, is the fundamental difference between AR and Reading Counts: RC has a bank of 30 questions for each book, and students are allowed to take a quiz on a book as many times as desired by local school consensus. Accelerated Reader has a set number of questions for each book, and the student can take the test only once, unless the program administrator goes into the program and changes the student's record. At my school, we expect students to answer eight out of 10 questions correctly in order to get credit for the quiz, and a student may take a test on a book three times in order to achieve the 80 percent. If the test isn't passed, both the software and our teachers encourage the students to re-read the book—and to do so more carefully while looking for facts—before trying the quiz again. The next time the student takes the quiz, the questions are again drawn randomly from the bank of 30, so the questions are not always the same or in the same order each time. We believe that this makes Reading Counts much more effective than AR as an instructional tool, and it allows us to expect the higher standard of 80 percent to get quiz credit.

Tommy Tatum, Media Specialist
Adairsville Middle School
Adairsville, GA

I enjoyed the article about Ezra Jack Keats in the May 2001 SLJ ("The Man Who Became Keats "). It reminded me of my personal experience with Mr. Keats. A children's librarian at the time, I attended the American Library Association conference the year that Hi, Cat! came out [1970]. Keats was scheduled to sign books at the publisher's booth, and I was very excited as his books were (and still are) some of my favourites. I kept returning to the booth to hear the rep repeat, "He's not here yet," until finally I heard, "He has just arrived!" So I bought my copy of Hi, Cat! and handed it to Keats to autograph. He told me that he was getting blasé; he used to always say "thank you!" when he autographed books because he was so tickled that people were buying them. But by now, he was used to it. As he started to sign my copy, the rep said, "That is the first copy ever sold of Hi, Cat!" So Mr. Keats autographed the book to me and added, "The first copy sold! Thank you!" As you can imagine, it is one of my prized possessions.

My first job was as a children's librarian at the New York Public Library, and I worked at the Aguilar Branch in East Harlem. Keats's Snowy Day was well loved at that branch! Thank you for the article.

Barbara B. Herd, Division Manager, Library Services West
Ottawa Public Library
Ottawa, Canada