The efficacy of perspective instantiation in improving middle school students' comprehension of informational text
Open Access
- Author:
- Ramsay, Crystal M
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- January 24, 2011
- Committee Members:
- Rayne Audrey Sperling, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Rayne Audrey Sperling, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Robert James Stevens, Committee Member
Pricilla Karen Murphy, Committee Member
John Daniel Marshall, Committee Member - Keywords:
- reading comprehension
relevance instructions
expository text
middle school - Abstract:
- This pretest posttest control group design study investigated whether assigning a perspective to fifth grade (n=74) and sixth grade (n=74) students prior to reading a long informational text would improve their performance on multiple measures of comprehension. All participants read an informational text on the topic the Wright Brothers, a passage that described how birds and bicycles influenced the invention of the airplane. While all participants read the same text, they were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions. Each condition was provided a different set of reading instructions that directed them to read the text from one of three perspectives: Bird perspective, Bicycle perspective, or Student perspective (comparison group). It was hypothesized that students who read from an assigned perspective—regardless of what the perspective was—would outperform those who did not read from a perspective on multiple measures of comprehension. It was further hypothesized that, when assigned a perspective, students would recall more text content that was relevant to their perspective than would those who read from either the alternative perspective or from the comparison perspective. Findings indicated statistically significant learning gains from pre- to posttest regardless of perspective, but that perspective assignment did not differentially benefit students’ comprehension overall or on perspective-relevant items. Previous research has demonstrated benefit from perspective instantiation in college age students and adults who read short narrative texts in experimental settings. The current study extends perspective research by testing the efficacy of perspective instantiation in middle school learners who read a longer informational text in a school setting.