When tracking the succes of your school's RC program, you focus on several key variables. One is the reading level of the books on which the kids are passing their quizzes. If the kids are picking books that are too easy, then they derive little benefit from reading them. On the other hand, if the they read books that are too challenging they end up being frustrated and they fail the quiz. The literature regarding the RC system advises that the students read in a range of 250 lexile points below their tested level and as much as 50 points above that level.
Currently, our 6th graders show an average pass rate of 70%. This number is a bit deceptive in that many of the failed quizzes come from a small minority of students who attempt to take quizzes on books that they did not finish reading; the teachers at my school call this 'shopping for points'. We could deter this behavior by penalizing students for failing a quiz but we avoid this because there are students who make a genuine attempt at reading a book and can not pass the quiz. We allow students who can't pass the quiz the chance to take a second quiz on the title. If they still can't pass, they have the opportunity to write a book report to earn reward points.
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2 comments:
Hi Matt,
How do you feel your inquiry is going? Are you seeing anything that suprises you? Are you gathering any data that measures or addresses student's attitudes towards the program?
Have a good day.
I think it's going ok. I can't say there are any big surprises so far. I am expecting the kids to admit that the system does get them to read a lot more than they normally would. I'm also pretty sure that this elevated reading level will subside when the program ends. My hope is that a few kids will get turned on to some new series of books--lots of our boys have discovered the Cirque De Freak books and have become avid fans. The rest will have grown their vocabularies hopefully through the extra reading.
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