Students thrive when they have realistic and motivating goals to encourage their reading progress. Last year, Accelerated Reader introduced helpful new features to support goals and goal setting, including:

• AR Friends, a K–2 goal model that encourages students to read books of varying lengths, depending upon their level, to unlock fun character badges.
• New, more motivating progress screens for students who are using the traditional AR goal model.
• An updated Record Book and streamlined goal-setting experience.

Based on your feedback, we’ve introduced additional enhancements to make AR even easier for students and teachers to use. Read on for the details!

Maintaining students’ reading motivation

Students who are using the AR Friends K–2 goal model often ask to see how their quiz results are contributing to earning badges. To make sure every successful quiz is celebrated, students now see all the quizzes they have passed this school year:

Students who are using the traditional AR goal model see guidance and actionable next steps on AR’s progress screens. Students now see a variety of new phrases at the top of these screens.

When students haven’t taken a quiz yet, they will be prompted to get started:

If students are not on pace to reach their goal, they receive encouragement—and see the number of points needed to get caught up:

When students achieve their goal, they’re celebrated and encouraged to keep achieving:

If students don’t reach their goal, they are encouraged to keep trying:

Monitoring and managing reading goals

You’ll find several visual changes in AR’s Record Book to help save time:

• You can now quickly see which goal model each class is using. This is especially helpful when supporting various models within your school.
• When editing goals, you can now see a student’s actual scores. This is most frequently needed when students have exceeded their goals and need a push to keep them engaged.
• You now see an indication of how many minutes of reading per day were assumed when calculating point goals.

There are now a couple of ways to determine if students are on track to reach their reading goal, as shown in the screenshot below:

Point goal indicators: You’ll see new red and green indicators that show whether a student is on track or falling behind. We’ve also expanded this series of indicators to provide more at-a-glance information. There are now callouts for Not Started, Goal Met, and Goal Exceeded. Each indicator is paired with a small pop-up that does the calculations. This shows the number of points a student needs in order to catch up or a weekly pace for them to stay on track.

Percent of point goal calculations: Based on your feedback, the percentage of goal calculation for students has returned to the Record Book. To help make this metric more meaningful, you’ll also see the percent of the marking period that is complete, saving time from calculating or running a second report to get that information.

New support for managing quiz records

We recognize that Accelerated Reader is used differently in different schools, so you now have added flexibility when working with quiz records:

• Nonfiction Article Quizzes: Previously, the option to deactivate/delete a nonfiction article quiz was not available in the Record Book. This option has been added to give you more control over a student’s record, in the instance that a student took a nonfiction article quiz by accident.
• Quiz Retake Preference: If you have been deleting old quizzes so students can retake a quiz, check out the new option in our Quiz Retake Preference. “Monitor Password” has been added to the timeframe options previously available. When this preference is set to “Monitor Password,” educators at the school will be able to allow students to retake quizzes on a case-by-case basis by entering the monitor password. You no longer need to look for and deactivate the old quiz.
• Manage Quiz Records Preference: This new school-level preference allows administrators to determine whether teachers can deactivate, transfer, or rescore quiz results in the AR Record Book. (Previously, this was managed at a district-wide level.) The preference defaults to allow teachers to manage quiz records. Preference settings were migrated over from the previous district-wide setting for those who had already altered the default.

For more information on managing AR quizzes, check out these resources:

• Help file for Deactivating Quizzes
• Help file for Manage Quiz Record Preference
• Help file for Quiz Retake Preference
• Guidance on When to Deactivate Quiz Records, Transfer Them, or Allow Students to Retake Quizzes

Motivating independent reading with authentic texts

If you haven’t already, explore the new 2022 edition of What Kids Are Reading, the world’s largest annual survey of K–12 student reading habits. The report uses Accelerated Reader and myON data to identify the most popular print and digital books at every grade level. It also shows you new & now titles, popular Spanish titles, and titles to support social-emotional learning—all of which have AR quizzes.