Date of Award

5-1988

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Education

First Advisor

Diane Denney

Second Advisor

Nancy Polette

Abstract

Will third grade students, who receive direct instruction in the development of metacomprehension, show greater gains in reading comprehension than students who receive regular instruction based on their teacher's basal manual? The purpose of this study was to compare two groups of third grade students , one control and one experimental, to determine whether direct instruction in the development of metacomprehension would significantly improve third grade reading comprehension.

The hypothesis of this study was that direct instruction in the development of metacomprehension would enable students to receive significantly higher scores in reading comprehension as measured on a standardized comprehension test than students who pursued the regular reading comprehension curriculum provided in the basal reader.

The subjects in the study were 46 third graders from two intact groups. The intact groups were from two different public schools in rural areas of Lincoln county.

The students in the experimental group received direct instruction to increase the readers' ability to monitor understanding of written text and to develop their knowledge of the existence, use, and value of the following comprehension strategies: (a) activating relevant background knowledge, (b) generating questions, (c) making predictions, (d) setting purposes for reading, and (e) summarizing. The students in the control group received regular instruction in reading comprehension provided in the Houghton Mifflin basal reading series . The Gates-MacGinitie reading comprehension test was used as a pretest and posttest for both the experimental and control groups.

The ,t-test was used to test the significance of the gains made by the experimental group compared to the control group after the experiment. The control group showed a significantly higher mean gain score from pretest to posttest than the experimental group. Therefore, the results of this study did not support the hypothesis that metacomprehension training would enable third grade students to receive significantly higher scores on a standardized reading comprehension test as compared to students who were taught according to the regular reading comprehension curriculum provided in the basal reader.

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