The Effects of Interest on Reading Comprehension of Low-Achieving Students.

Abstract

on the cover. 12 stories that were used in the study are: The Night the Ghost Got In, by James Thurber; The Fog Horn, by Ray Bradbury; For the Love of a Man, by Jack London; Her First Ball, by Katherine Mansfield; Road to the Isles, by Jessamyn West; Pony Penning Day, by Marguerite Henry; The Second Rater, by Herbert Hagedon; War, by Jack London; Bauman's Tale, by Theodore Roosevelt; The Ambitious Guest, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Outcasts of Poker Flat, by Bret Harte; and The Man and the Snake, by Ambrose Bierce. One of the authors met with each student individually to determine reading interests. They were instructed to thumb through the booklets, read the titles and abstracts, and select the one story they would most like to read and the one story they would least like to read. At group sessions which were held about a week later, students were asked to read the stories they had selected. Order effects were controlled by having half the students read the high interest stories at the first session and low interest stories at the second session and reversing the order for the other students. reading was immediately followed by the administration of a cloze test especially prepared for each selection. A passage of approximately 250 words was extracted from the middle of each story and every fifth BELLONI & JONGSMA: Effects of Interest 107 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:43:32 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Table 1 Cloze Test Means and Standard Deviations Based on High Interest and Low Interest Passages High Interest Passage Low Interest Passage Mean Standard Deviation Mean Standard Deviation Boys 19.40 6.53 15.90 5.85 Girls 19.64 4.25 15.40 6.59 Total 19.53 5.38 15.63 6.19