- Author:
- Craig Allan Haugsness
This study evaluated the effectiveness of two methods of delivering required practice and training to secondary reading students. The study was concerned with overall effectiveness as measured by reading comprehension. The two delivery systems, traditional and computer assisted instruction, were selected as being very different in actual practice while maintaining the same content and time constraints. With traditional methods, the student is exposed to practice material with controlled reading projectors, timed comprehension reading, and printed worksheets. For the experimental group the practice material was presented on a Commodore 64 microcomputer with the computer software program The Reading Professor. This program offers a variety of traditional reading practice techniques including: timed reading with comprehension questions, controlled speed reading, and controlled speed phrases.
The study was conducted at a high school in a medium-sized midwestern city during the fall semester of the 1985-1986 school year. The advanced reading or college-bound reading practice classes constituted the control and the experimental groups. Within each class each subject was assigned to a performance group based on the subject's pretest score. Performance groups were divided into high, medium and low groups. Performance groups were designed to test whether subjects of different performance levels would derive different levels of performance following treatment. The material used with each group was matched for reading level and length of material.
Following an analysis of covariance a significant difference was found between the traditional and the computer assisted instruction treatments for reading practice. Reported cell means show a significantly higher score for the experimental group. An examination of the group means adjusted for the covariate supports the apparent differences between the two treatment groups: traditional and computer assisted instruction. The adjusted mean scores for the low, medium and high performance groups confirm that there was no significant difference between the groups. Expected differences between students of high, medium and low performance groups did not materialize.