Reading Accountability Without Quizzes

Replace traditional quiz-based platforms like Accelerated Reader with a more engaging approach to reading accountability. Our innovative integrity features put the focus back on developing healthy reading habits and a love of reading.

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Make Reading Fun, Not Forced

Motivating today’s students to read requires moving beyond quizzes and adopting a more engaging, interactive approach. By focusing on gamification, you can spark a love for reading, build lasting habits, and encourage responsible digital behavior—without the pressure of constant assessments.

Relying on quizzes can stifle enthusiasm, but focusing on independent reading time fosters a love for books and lifelong reading habits.

Gamification makes reading engaging and rewarding, using challenges, rewards, and milestones to build consistent, long-term reading habits.

Shifting from constant testing to encouraging independent reading helps prevent burnout and fosters a genuine passion for reading.

Fostering digital citizenship through reading platforms teaches students responsible online navigation and ethical behavior by engaging in challenges, exploring diverse content, and sharing their progress on a regular basis.

Summer reading challenges help offset summer slide

Honest Logging Made Easy

The Reading Integrity Suite is a proprietary set of features that helps schools ensure honest logging while preserving students’ reading independence. Our simple yet effective system provides clear, actionable insights, allowing staff to focus energy on students rather than combing through data.

  • Custom Log Limits and Settings

    Set logging limits and warnings to promote honest logging. Review and address inflated logs directly with the student.

  • Take a Closer Look System

    Detect logging issues effortlessly with our system, which flags potential fraudulent activity by analyzing suspicious characteristics like unusually short titles, logs exceeding school-set limits, and excessively long or nonsensical titles without a valid ISBN.

  • Verification and Freezing

    Celebrate voracious readers who exceed school logging limits. Freeze a reader’s account to address issues with dishonest logging.

Deepen Reading Engagement

Ready to move beyond points-based programs like Accelerated Reader? Reward reading effort—like minutes spent reading—and watch motivation and participation soar as students engage more deeply with their reading while also improving comprehension skills.

  • Book Reviews

    Encourage critical thinking and analysis with book reviews. Require a minimum character count for students’ reviews and approve submissions for other students to view.

  • Short Answer Activities

    Enrich students’ independent reading and add integrity to assignments with activities that include open-text answer submissions as an accountability task.

  • Reading comprehension questions are more equitable than AR quizzes

    Reading Validation Challenges

    Engage students with optional Reading Validation Challenges that ask short, simple fill-in-the-blank questions to verify their reading.

Balancing Integrity With Reading Independence

Beanstack includes multiple features to discourage fraudulent logging. It allows students to read what they want while teachers have the tools to track all types of reading, not just completed books. This balance preserves student choice and keeps them engaged, ensuring authentic progress is monitored effectively.

Setting limits in Beanstack prevents exaggerated logging, ensuring authenticity and promoting genuine reading growth.

Analyzing log data helps educators identify students needing support, adjust challenges, and celebrate authentic reading progress.

Beanstack’s social tools, like leaderboards and student highlights, foster accountability, deter exaggerated logging, and promote a supportive reading culture during class time and beyond.

Incorporating activities and book reviews into challenges deepens student engagement and naturally verifies the accuracy of reading logs.

“Beanstack really helped some of our students who were not into reading … It wasn't like … 'I have to go in here, write a paragraph,' … instead, 'I can really just read this book and log.' That works for a lot of our students.”
Jaycie Holland Media Specialist Mitchell County Middle School, Georgia

Learn how reading challenges helped boost Georgia middle school students' reading skills and comprehension scores by nearly 10% after two years of pandemic learning loss.

Level Up Your Reading Program

From engaging reading challenges that foster motivation and community to valuable data and insights for tracking student progress, Beanstack empowers schools to build vibrant reading cultures in an easy way.

  • Activate Students’ Intrinsic Motivation

    Gamification features like achievement badges, reading streaks, and leaderboards turn reluctant readers into avid readers. Instant feedback, positive encouragement, and limitless choice in reading challenges help kids and teens rediscover the joy of reading as a whole group.

    All About Gamification
  • Build a Community That Reads

    We help you foster a reading culture at school and at home by making reading a community endeavor rather than an isolated individual task. Readers can interact with each other through reading with friends, leaderboards, community goals, and classroom competitions.

    Build a Reading Culture
  • Offer Unlimited Reading Choices

    There is no restrictive digital library or specified Accelerated Reader books. Readers can log any independent reading book or reading material—whether it’s from the school library, their public library, or at home—and get the same amount of credit.

    See Our Content
  • Create a Powerful Reading Hub

    The sky’s the limit with Beanstack. We work with any and all different book collections, open educational resources, and assessment strategies. We can even help drive up the use of your existing resources with integrated activities, book lists, and challenges.

  • Reading list challenge support curriculum alignment

    Track Reading Lists and Assignments

    School media specialists can set up custom reading challenges to track daily student reading logs, select assigned reading curriculum-aligned titles, promote new books, or require certain amounts of reading each day or week. Teachers and administrators can easily monitor progress and guide students’ reading journeys, helping them learn reading-specific skills.

  • Gain Actionable Lexile Insights

    Ditch Accelerated Reader tests, quiz questions, and points calculations in favor of free choice reading and student autonomy. With Beanstack’s accountability system, students can go on a book adventure that follows their interests, and staff can see the title Lexile level growth in reports and on our dashboards.

    Learn More
  • Get Results

    Easy-to-use dashboards and reports give insight into daily reading progress for individual students, classes, and teachers during a specific time frame or for the entire school or district during the school year. You can monitor reading goals, target your interventions, and report on reading gains.

    Get Robust Reporting

Keep Reading Fun

Beanstack provides an alternative to Accelerated Reader by promoting and reinforcing independent reading habits, allowing teachers to monitor students’ reading progress without the burden of quizzes.

Get in Touch!

Talk to our team today to learn more about ramping up reading integrity and motivation at your school—without stress, restrictive choices, or quizzes.