| What is Reading Counts?
Reading Counts is a Scholastic program that was once Electronic Bookshelf. Electronic Bookshelf was one of the first commercial reading incentive programs. Reading Counts is described as a software management package that “ manages and motivates independent reading district- or school-wide.”
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Additional Information for Reading Counts
- Scholastic Achievement Manager (SAM), which generates reports for teachers, administrators, and systems.
- Unlimited site license and technical support for one year.
- Book Expert, a search engine that allows searches by topic, genre, author, reading level.
- 210 book tests. (1,020 for Value Pack).
- Cost: $699.00 ($1,999 for Value Pack).
- Individual tests: $2.75 (Various prices for CD collections of quizzes).
- Advertises quizzes available for 3,500 titles.
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What are Pros and Cons for Reading Counts use?
Pros:
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Pool of 30 questions per quiz gives readers a different test set each time they attempt the quiz.
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Unlimited teacher-made quizzes can be added to the program .
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Points for books based on length and difficulty.
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Gives useful teacher reports including alerts for student problems, individual student and class reports and summaries.
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Two levels of management: teacher and program administrator (librarian).
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Extensive telephone support.
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Cons:
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Uses lexiles instead of grade level to measure student reading levels and progress.
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Difficult to measure lexile (reading level) when adding teacher-made tests without the added expense of Lexile Analyzer software.
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Quizzes take up to 20 seconds to come up—AR quizzes are instantaneous.
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Student given full points for passing a quiz, even if scoring the minimal grade.
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Student report after a quiz gives only score and number of words read—no indication of student’s progress.
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Training classes are not extensive—still in development process.
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The Last Word...
Scholastic is still developing this program and coordinating it with their other school resources. Because of their attempt to go head-to-head with Accelerated Reader, they are offering special deals to schools that now use AR. An investment in Reading Counts is obviously designed to lead to the purchase of other Scholastic resources that tie in with this reading incentive program—packages that work with the SAM software, paperbacks, hardbacks, point rewards, teacher resources, etc.
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