By: Jill Kane, Managing Editor, Renaissance USA

Each school day, hundreds of thousands of students in the U.S. and 70 other countries will assess their reading comprehension and reading-skill mastery goals using Renaissance Accelerated Reader^® quizzes and practice activities. The assessments these students complete come from the more than 200,000 quizzes in our system—a number that grows by approximately 8,000 quizzes each year.

In this blog post, I will take you behind the scenes to learn more about how Renaissance develops quizzes that are psychometrically sound, valid, and reliable assessments of reading practice that confirm a student’s reading comprehension.

1. Selecting books students want to read

At the heart of Accelerated Reader is, of course, a book—actually, lots of them. Each year, Renaissance develops quizzes based on roughly 6,000 books that comprise an equal number of fiction and nonfiction titles.

We cast a wide net to help ensure quizzes are developed for popular, newer books, though these are not always the most current titles. Our sources include the following:

• Book reviews
• Best-of lists
• Book-award winners
• Past performance of books by specific authors
• School-library publishers, which produce book series that focus on U.S. states, sports, animals, planets, and more
• More than 350 librarian lists from across the U.S.
• Customer requests 

Also, we develop quizzes for books published by today’s most popular authors, such as Jeff Kinney, author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Once we identify the list of books we’ll add to our library and we have them in hand, we are ready to begin the process of developing an Accelerated Reader quiz.

2. Getting to know a book, inside and out

Before the Renaissance Content Development team can begin writing a quiz, each book must first be processed, which includes three phases:

• Digitising the pages. After Renaissance receives a book from the publisher, we enter its information into our content management system (CMS). This includes scanning the book, page by page, to make a digital copy.
• Assessing the readability level. With the book now in our CMS, a separate system, ATOS—a readability formula developed specifically for Renaissance—provides the title’s readability level.
• Determining the interest level. Next, with information we receive from the publisher, we determine the book’s interest level. In Accelerated Reader, we have four levels: lower grades, middle grades, middle grades-plus and upper grades. (We also have a fifth level for our three-question pre-K, emergent reader quizzes.) The combination of readability and interest levels provides educators with a powerful tool for gauging whether the density of the text and the subject matter of the book are an appropriate match for a student.

3. Quality control is key to a reliable assessment

With processing and assessment activities complete, the book is assigned to one of our 30 content developers, matching the book to the expertise and experience of the writer. Within a week’s time—sooner if the book is popular and customer demand is high—the writer will have read the book and written a “raw quiz” that is ready for a series of rigorous quality checks: