| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺中教育大學 === 語文教育學系碩博士班 === 103 === Good reading ability helps learning and competitiveness. Good reading ability helps one’s competitiveness; it also indicates a country’s competitiveness.Throughout the world many countries strive to cultivate their students’ reading ability, which demonstrates the importance of reading education.
According to the survey of PIRLS 2011, the academic achievement of Taiwan’s 4th graders significantly improve, compared with the results of 2006 school year. Nevertheless, regarding proportion of students of different levels, the number of high achievers tends to increase while that of low achievers remains about the same. As to text types, students perform better in explanatory texts than story texts. Therefore, how to help students use good reading comprehension strategies when they read story texts and observe reading performances of students of different levels are worthy of investigation.
This study deals with the effect of the 4th graders’ use of graphic organizers strategy on reading comprehension. Two research questions are posed. One is to understand the status quo of the 4th graders’ reading comprehension and the other is to investigate their reading efficacy, using graphic organizers strategy instruction. This quasi-experimental study uses pre- and post-tests with non-equivalent groups. Eighty-one 4th graders of a private elementary school in Taichung join the study. Forty-three students serve as experimental group, receiving graphics organization strategy instruction while 38 students, serving as control group, receive traditional reading lessons without additional graphics organization teaching. The experiment lasts for 8 weeks with 8 class sessions in total.
PIRLS reading comprehension test is used as pre- and post-test instrument. The pretest is used as a covariate. This experiment aims to investigate the effect of graphic organizers strategy on reading comprehension. After data analysis, the results show:
1. The majority of the subjects’ reading comprehension abilities have reached upper-intermediate levels.
2. Graphic organizers strategy significantly upgrades the subjects’ reading comprehension.
(1) Experimental group, high achievers, and lower achievers do not perform significantly better than their control counterparts in overall reading comprehension scores.
(2) Experimental group, high achievers, and lower achievers do not perform significantly better than their control counterparts in direct comprehension process scores.
(3) Experimental and control groups do not differ significantly in interpretation comprehension process scores. Regarding their gained scores, experimental high achievers and lower achievers perform significantly better than their control counterparts in interpretation comprehension process scores.
Based on the results of the study, the researcher makes suggestions as to how to improve elementary students’ reading comprehension.
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