Competency 9: Internet Website

For my last and final competency my assignment is to search for a website that is reputable and supports my topic area which is Accelerated Reader. To begin my search quest I was instructed to use a meta search engine. Before this class I had no idea that meta-search engines even existed. I chose to use Dogpile.com but there are various others that you can also search: Clusty.com, Surfwax.com, and Copernic.com. Searching for accelerated reader in dogpile I was able to find some new websites that I had not yet discovered when using Google or Yahoo. This is a screen print of Dogpile.com:

My subject area is Elementary Librarian with a focus on the Accelerated Reader program. This reading program is a commercial product that many schools around the country are implementing to create life long readers. The question in debate is whether it truly does create life long readers. Accelerated Reader has a website that I would like to share with you to review. This is the link: http://www.renlearn.com/ar/ Here you can read up more about the program and what it entails.

Providing a commercial website is definitely one sided so I wanted to provide a second website that would give a rounded view of the program with both the pros and the cons. I found: http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/whatsnu_ar.html

This website was create by Jim Trelease. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts ('63) and native of New Jersey (Union and North Plainfield), Jim Trelease was a award- winning artist and journalist before turning his career toward education in 1979 when he began writing the first edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook. His focus of study has been to see if there is any connection in being read to as compared to a child who wants to read. In this website he offers various dissertations and articles written for and against Accelerated Reader. Although I found the site to lean more towards the cons of Accelerated Reader, it does offer another side to this program by those who have done research on this topic.

I felt that to do justice to this issue both sides needed to be offered. Commercial products will always have websites that are engaging and exciting to read. They offer professional websites and brochures that will help others to become motivated to use their product. By offering Treleases' website in this assignment, I feel I am offering another look into this program. To form an opinion on any subject you always need to study both sides of the coin. By offering these two websites, I feel that it offers a more well rounded view of the program.

Competency 8: Multimedia

To complete this competency I was in search of a multimedia component to add to this blog about my subject area. I have been researching the effects of Accelerated Reader and whether is motivates students to read. From discussions I have had with students at the school I work for, students are enjoying this program. They compete with each other to see who has read the most words in class and by grade level. The program tally's the amount of words they read and documents it each time they take a test. They can only get credit for a book as long as they have an 80 or better on the test. The ultimate goal is to become a millionaire reader by the end of the year. Below is a study chart that displays results of positive effects this program is having from Kindergarten through 6th grade.


To read up more about this study you can follow this link:
Accelerated Reader Has Positive Effects on Reading Ability.Nunnery, J.A., S.M. Ross, & A. McDonald
A large Experimental study conducted in an urban school district showed that students using AR and best practices achieved higher reading gains than non-AR users.
http://research.renlearn.com/research/pdfs/198.pdf

Competency 7: Social Netwoking

My assignment is to search for an appropriate social network site and either create a profile for myself or find an example of one in my topic area. Social networking is something new to me so I started by searching for the top 5 social networking sites. My Space is number 1 overall and MSN Groups came in 5th in the top five list and 2nd place for retention rate. I chose to search through MSN Groups for an example of my topic area, Accelerated Reader, and was pleasantly surprised to find one. The Gilman-Danforth Library staff in Gilman Illinois, are marking all of the books in the children's department with book level and points for Renaissance Learning. As a future elementary librarian, I was pleased to hear that a public library was working together with the local school, Gilman-Danforth Elementary, to provide children with opportunities to check out books at the public setting that will be marked for this program. The site provides information about this new adventure, homework help tips, and a list of the new elementary books and easy books available. This is a wonderful collaboration between the local library and elementary to work together to help foster a love for reading books.

This is the link to MSN Groups: http://groups.msn.com/

Here is the screen print of the Gilman-Danforth Library Site:

To visit this site you can click on the following link:
http://groups.msn.com/Gilman-DanforthDistrictLibrary/stuffforkids.msnw

Competency 6: Search 4

This is the last search I will be conducting for this Competency. I chose to use Dialog as the database. This database is a commercial database and requires a password to access it. I chose to use Pearl Citation Growing for the search strategy. With this search strategy you search as directly as possible and then use the descriptors that are provided as pearls to help you continue on your search process.

Database: DIALOG

Search Strategy: Pearl growing search

To begin my search I typed in Accelerated Reading:

This is the 1st hit for the query: Accelerated Reader. Also shown at the bottom is the list of descriptors provided for expanding the search query.

With the additional descriptors provided I was able to expand the search to provided more information to work from. Here is the next screen shot that displays the growth from the pearls of descriptors given.


Results:

This method helps when you have a specific title or subject in mind when searching. It helps you to be able to expand from the descriptors the database provides to find more information. This search I worked on offered more descriptive ideas to work from and that helps in the long run when you need more information to glean from.

Competency 6: Search 3

In this search I used the Successive Fractions technique which begins with a broad strategy that will produce high recall. Then restrictions are applied as needed to narrow to the results desired.

Search: Successive Fractions

Database: WorldCat

S1 Broadest Facet: Reading Programs = 13, 188 hits

S2 Narrowed by adding S1 AND Accelerated Reader = 30 hits

S3 Narrowed again by adding the third facet: S2 AND Elementary Libraries = 1 hit

Below are screen shots from this search:

S3 produced the following hit:

Title:
Analysis of the Principal's perceptions of the implementation and impact of the accelerated reader and other selected reading strategies used by Texas gold performance elementary schools
Author(s):
Elmore, Olivia Carol, 1948-
Publication:
[College Station, Tex. :; Texas A&M University,
Year:
2005
Dissertation:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas A&M University, 2005.
Language:
English
Abstract:
Knowledge of the implementation practices of successful elementary schools will be beneficial to other elementary principals who seek to improve student success in reading. This study examined perceptions of principals from elementary schools in Texas whose schools received the Gold Performance Acknowledgement (GPA) from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) for Continuous Improvement in Reading (CIR) on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) in 2002. The study had two purposes: (1) to identify the principal's perception of the levels of implementation and impact of selected reading strategies used by selected elementary schools in Texas to improve student success in reading and (2) to determine the principal's perception of the extent to which Accelerated Reader (AR) and AR-like recommend practices were used in selected elementary schools in Texas. The research design for this study was descriptive. Parameters, which are descriptive measures of a population, were used since all 721 members of the population were mailed questionnaires. Research was conducted during the winter of 2004. Two hundred fifty-two principals responded. A questionnaire using a Likert type scale for the principals' responses was used to collect the data. Principals' perceptions were measured to determine the degree of implementation and impact of AR and other selected reading strategies. Data were analyzed for all 252 respondents for selected reading strategies and by the categories of AR and non-AR schools for AR recommended reading strategies and AR-like recommended reading strategies, respectively. This study identified the characteristics of a successful reading program in Texas elementary schools. To maximize their budgets while improving student success in reading, principals should provide their teachers with professional development, implement student/teacher conferences to direct reading practice, allow students to self-select books on their independent reading level for independent reading practice, consider use of literature circles, classroom libraries and reading textbooks, review the use of rewards and posting of goals to determine if these practices increase students' success in reading, assess computer reading programs to determine if there are less costly options available, and in schools using the AR program, review implementation practices for greater impact.

Results:

My objective here was to demonstrate how to use successive factions. When I arrived with the results of the query S2 I could have stopped there because 30 results is a good number to work from. Instead, I chose to add the third and final query for demonstration purposes. S3 query ended up with just one hit. Although that one particular hit did offer good information, a person who is researching would want more information to work from. I would then go back to S2 and work from those 30 hits to find the information needed for my study.

Competency 6: Search 2

In this quest for information I will be searching the ERIC database for more information on Reading Renaissance or Accelerated Reader using the Specific Facet First Model for retrieval.
Specific Facet means that you are searching for the facet or term, that is most likely to retrieve the fewest items first. If the first search provides 30 or fewer hits, you can stop, examine the information, and decide whether you need to search for more information or not.



Database: ERIC


Search Strategy: Specific Facet

Facet 1: Reading Renaissance = 12 hits

• The first screen shot shows the Database and the facet I entered.
• The second screen shot shows the 12 results that were produced.

This is the first Hit I received and the abstract follows:
Accelerated Reader/Reading Renaissance. What Works Clearinghouse Intervention Report . What Works Clearinghouse. 2007 14 pp. (ED496196)Full Text from ERIC
Abstract:
The Accelerated Reader/Reading Renaissance program (now called Accelerated Reader Best Classroom Practices) is a guided reading intervention in which teachers direct student reading of text. It involves two components. Reading Renaissance, the first component, is a set of recommended principles on guided reading (or teachers' direction of students' interactions with text). Accelerated Reader (AR), the second component, is a computer program that facilitates reading practice by providing students and teachers feedback from quizzes based on the books the students read. The program gives students opportunity to practice reading books at their level, provides feedback on student comprehension of books, and helps students establish goals for their reading. One study of Accelerated Reader/Reading Renaissance met the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) evidence standards. The study included 910 students from grades K to 3 attending 11 schools in a southern school district in the United States. The WWC considers the extent of evidence for Accelerated Reader/Reading Renaissance to be small for comprehension and for general reading achievement. No studies that met WWC standards with or without reservations addressed alphabetics or fluency. Accelerated Reader/Reading Renaissance was found to have potentially positive effects on comprehension and general reading achievement. [This publication was produced by the What Works Clearinghouse. The following study is reviewed in this intervention report: Ross, S.M., Nunnery, J., & Goldfeder, E. (2004). "A randomized experiment on the effects of Accelerated Reader/Reading Renaissance in an urban school district: Preliminary evaluation report." Memphis, TN: The University of Memphis, Center for Research in Educational Policy.]

Results:

• After reviewing the results I was able to find relevant information for my topic. In this case, I can stop my search and work from what I have found. I decided to go ahead and try two other facet queries to show those results. After reviewing the results you can see that stopping with the first facet would be more manageable to read through for relevant information.

Facet 2: Accelerated Reader: 75 hits
Facet 3: Reading Programs: 9,127

Competency 6: Search 1

For Competency 6, I will be performing four searches using four databases in my subject area of Elementary Library and the reading program, Accelerated Reader. Below are the results for Search 1:

Search Technique: Building Block
Database: Library Literature
Limiter: 2003-2007

S1 Elementary Library or School Library or Primary School = 4,924 hits
S2 Trends or Use or Issues = 6,213 hits
S3 Reading Renaissance or Accelerated Reader or Reading Renaissance = 199 hits
S4= S1 AND S2 AND S3 = 17 hits

This First Screen Shot show the database and how I performed the search:

This screen shot shows the final 17 results:

Here is the first Hit from the final 17 results:

Franklin, P., et. al., Manage Your Computerized Reading Program--Before It Manages You!. School Library Media Activities Monthly v. 23 no. 4 (December 2006) p. 47-9

Abstract:
Advice for school library media specialists on managing the Accelerated Reader and Reading Counts computerized reading programs is provided.

Results:

When working with the building block method it is helpful to write down a graphic organizer of search words that you will be working with to help you on your search quest. When I initially started working on this type of search I used the database thesaurus to help me find words that could expand my search. It is amazing the amount of descriptors that we fail to think of but that are indeed part of the process of searching that relates to the topic at hand. While my last query, s4, provided only 17 results, it is a manageable number of hits and offered relevant information. If more information is desired the descriptors used could be manipulated differently to produce more hits.

Competency 5: LibraryThing

Searching for a book related to Elementary Librarianship and Reading, I found the following book: "Learning About Books and Libraries: A Gold Mine of Games," by Carol K. Lee. To learn more about this book I went to Amazon.com and found an editorial review from the School Library Journal that states the following: "This practical resource for media specialist, classroom teachers, and homeschoolers assists in introducing students to the worlds of children's literature and research....An excellent, well-planned, and thorough book." Although I have not read the book, I was excited to read that she offers activities to help create a passion for reading and activities to enhance library skills. This book is geared for grade levels Kinder through Sixth grade. Attached is a list of Tags related to this book.

apt(1) children's literature(1) ed(1) elementary library(1) games(1) info literacy(1) lib(1) library resource(1) media specialist(1) nf(1) reading skills(1) school library(2) teaching(1)

You can access this book from LibraryThing through the following link:
http://www.librarything.com/work/1323733&book=21785343

Competency 4: RSS

Searching for an RSS feed was a challenge. This week we are discussing natural language vs controlled for information representation and retrieval. I experienced some difficulties with natural language as I tried to attempt using my own word choices in locating an RSS feed that would fall under the topic of Elementary Libraries or Accelerated Reader. I must have typed in over a dozen different ways of using those topic words in both Yahoo and Google. I finally found LIBWorm with the subject of Library Schools. It has several articles on School Libraries and even one titled "The Curse of Controlled Vocabulary." I am looking forward to seeing how this RSS feed will update itself throughout this semester.

Module 3: Podcast Search

The competency for Module three is to find a podcast. My quest for this search took some time but I finally found one that I felt offered some valuable information about Accelerated Reader. It is a podcast power point presentation. The authors name is Linda Sears. She works as a Library Media Specialist for Oak Mountain Intermediate School. I chose to use Sears podcast because it provides a summary of what Accelerated Reader is about and how parents can help manage and encourage their children to read with this program. Although the podcast is geared for parents, it is also helpful for anyone who is unfamiliar with the program.

"The Blog URL is:http://podcasts.shelbyed.k12.al.us/lsears

I found this site using Blogsearch.

Module 2 Blog Search: Accelerated Reader

My assignment for this competency is to find a blog related to my area of interest. In my quest for this search, I found a blog submitted by Kari Weathers. She is a Kindergarten teacher from Loretto, Tennessee, who blogs for Families.com. In this blog she details aspects of the Accelerated Reading program while also making some personal comments of her own about the program.

Here are a few quotes from Weathers blog: "Accelerated Reader is an individualized reading program designed to promote student interest in reading." Weathers mentions: " There is an extensive group of research that confirms that Accelerated Reader program is effective." She also explains that: "Students that did not enjoy reading had motivation to read."

The Blog URL is:
http://education.families.com/blog/accelerated-reader-program
I found this site using Google Blog Search.

Focus

This blog is established for the purpose of satisfying the requirements of 5013-22, ISAR. I will be posting my competencies here during the semester term via this blog. My focus will be on Elementary Library service and how programs such as Reading Renaissance and Accelerated Reader are used to encourage student reading.