[LIT] Accelerated Reader

[Mary Lou]

Hi all,

A question came up yesterday in my middle level DI course.  A student was
wondering about the use of Accelerated Reader in school as the primary
strategy to track a middle level student's independent reading.  

This teacher would like to see some alternative strategies used to do this.
It is her opinion that students who have "good memories" do well with these
tests, students that do not have good memories do more poorly and feel
discouraged.  

So...do you use it and how effective in your opinion is it?  For those of
you who use alternative means to track outside reading and have used AR in
the past - how did you convince your school to move to other tracking means?

Thanks in advance,
Mary Lou