Research Basics by James V. Spickard;

Author:James V. Spickard; [Spickard;, James V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781483387239
Publisher: Sage
Published: 2020-04-27T10:13:42+00:00

Results

The results were interesting, though I won’t go into detail. There was a clear, steady drop in kids’ attitudes toward both school and recreational reading between first and sixth grades. First graders liked reading a lot; their scores were at or near the smiling Garfield on the ERAS survey. For sixth graders, the average score for academic reading was a bit better than a frown. Sixth graders were significantly more positive than that about recreational reading, though their attitude toward that, too, was lower than for first graders.

This pattern held true for students regardless of reading ability. High, medium, and low readers all liked reading less in sixth grade than in first. The decline was steeper for school reading than for recreational reading, though students with higher reading skills maintained more interest in recreational reading across the grades. Girls were more interested in reading than were boys. The ethnic groups’ results were mixed: White sixth graders were a bit more interested in recreational reading than were African Americans and Latinos, whereas African Americans were more interested in school reading than were Whites.

The degree to which teachers used basal readers did not seem to make much difference. Sixth-grade reading interest was lower than first-grade interest both for those who used basal readers heavily and for those who did not. Despite some people’s worries, reading the modern equivalents of Dick and Jane did not kill kids’ wish to read. McKenna and his colleagues did not find that either reading system had any significant effects on student attitudes.

Did this study accomplish its objectives? Let’s go back to the three research questions, to see if the survey was able to answer them.

The answer to the first question is clear: The study showed that kids’ interest in reading dropped steadily between first and sixth grades. It dropped about half as much for recreational reading as it did for school reading, but it dropped for both. We now know that the earlier, local findings are also true for schools nationwide.

The answer to the second question is also clear: Reading skills, gender, and ethnicity somewhat affected the shape of the drop in interest, though they did not reverse it for any of these student categories.

Table 8.5

The answer to the third question is a bit less clear. On a descriptive level, the extent that teachers used one or another reading system did not seem to matter much to students’ loss of interest. Remember, though, that this question was not just descriptive but also causal. The authors wanted to know what effects could be ascribed to the use of basal readers. That’s a harder question, to which this research does not give a satisfactory answer.

The problem is, the teachers were asked how much they used basal readers in the current year, not how much the students had been exposed to them in the past. A sixth-grade student might have used basal readers for several years but now be in a non-basal-reader class. It turns out, this wasn’t a good measure of basal reader use.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.