Date of Award

4-1988

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in Education

Department

Education

First Advisor

Gene Henderson

Second Advisor

Nancy Polette

Abstract

In this study, the impact of teaching discriminatory listening skills to kindergarten children was investigated. The children were taught for 15 minutes daily for 12 weeks. The lessons consisted of paper and crayon activities, playing listening games, using books and tapes at a listening center, and some following directions activities .

It was hypothesized that the intact experimental group would do better on the posttest than the intact control group , that t he males listening skills would increase more than the females, and that the older and younger students' listening skills would increase more than those of the students in the middle age group.

The sample consisted of 52 kindergarten children of two classes at Progress South Elementary School in the Fort Zumwalt School District, St. Peters, Missouri . The experimental design consisted of intact groups , since random sampling was not available . The experimental group attended A.M. kindergarten . There were 25 children in this group, of which 15 were males and 10 were females . The control group of 27 children attended P.M. kindergarten.

A pretest and posttest using t he listening section of level 5 of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills was given. The data gathered for this study were assessed and analyzed using the independent t-test . The major hypothesis was rejected because the experimental group did not show more improvement through developing discriminatory listening skills than the control group. Males' listening skills did not increase more than females. The older students did not show more improvement than the middle aged students . The younger students did show more improvement than the middle age students, however the difference was not statistically significant at the .10 level.

It was concluded that teaching discriminatory listening skills does not necessarily improve student listening ability at the kindergarten level.

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