DIGITAL REVOLUTION & CONVERGENCE CULTURE

One of my earliest literacy experiences was through the Accelerated Reader program in elementary school. According the program’s sponsor, Renaissance Learning, Accelerated Reader is designed to help teachers “manage and monitor children’s independent reading practices.” In this program, elementary students are assessed to determine their reading levels. Based on the results of this assessment, students are tasked with selecting a book at their own level and then reading at their own pace. When finished, students take an online quiz to determine if they understand the reading material. Teachers use the results of these quizzes to help students set manageable reading goals. Additionally, the Accelerated Reader program motivates students to read by employing a points-based system. Students earn points by scoring high on reading quizzes to earn prizes, and potentially, to progress to a higher reading level.

 

Although the goal of the Accelerated Reader program is to help students feel comfortable reading at their own level and their own pace, reading levels often become competitive. For instance, when I was an elementary student, I remember my assessed reading level as “pink” which was a high reading level, but not as high as some of the other students in the class. I felt as though my reading ability was being scrutinized and judged. I saw my reading level not as a representation of my own skills, but rather as a comparison of my literacy abilities to other students’ abilities. This feeling progressed as I took the reading quizzes for each book I read. Most of the quizzes I had little trouble with, but one in particular proved to be a challenge: Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery.  I had to take the quiz three times before passing with an adequate score. The questions involved such minute details that the quiz seemed to test memory recall rather than reading comprehension. I felt incompetent because I knew at least two other people in the class who had already passed the Anne of Green Gables quiz. Even after I (finally) passed the test, I felt bad about myself and frustrated with the program. If this was a representation of what reading is supposed to be like, it seemed more damaging than helpful. Accelerated Reader turned reading from an activity I enjoyed to something competitive and detrimental to my self-esteem. Certainly my experience is not universal; however, I believe that in the present culture, many people associate literacy—especially reading literacy—with standardized programs like Accelerated Reader.

 

For many people, at one time myself included, the Accelerated Reader program represents literacy. In fact, the program is meant to be an assessment of and a monitoring practice for literacy activities of elementary students. However, if not interrogated, this representation is harmful. The Accelerated Reader program presents a version of literacy in which people’s abilities are compared and ranked against one another, and furthermore, wherein literacy in a given area comes to mean rote memorization of facts or details rather than a learning process aimed to foster understanding and flexible use. Although I now find literacy to be more dynamic and nuanced than my chosen artifact suggests, it has taken me a long time to reach this new understanding. While literacy traditionally means the ability to read and write, this definition has expanded to include other activities, like digital literacy. More importantly, though, our understanding of literacy has been complicated by individual enactments of literacy. With this new understanding, we should employ new methods for assessing students’ literacy to prevent competitive ranking and more accurately measure the intended abilities as well as how those abilities might apply to different contexts.