Achieve College Success

Reading Comprehension Strategy Makes Student Scream (Part 2)

I promised in my last blog to give you the results of my friend’s study. Before I share his comments and results I want to share what has happened with a few of my students. A couple of my students made failing grades on two of my quizzes. I asked them to prepare for the next exam by reading the chapter once, but to stop after each paragraph and explain it out loud. The latest brain research indicates that most people can remember 90% of what they teach or explain compared to 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they both hear and see. Both of my students tried this strategy and they made As on the next quiz. Another student improved from a D average on previous quizzes to a B after using this technique.

My friend is Lynn Skaggs, PhD and professor of Psychology at Central Texas College. Here are his results in his own words:

The results were really good. I had 25 students participate and were pretty evenly distributed among the three groups: 1 – read once summarizing each paragraph out loud before going to the next paragraph; 2- read the chapter 3 times; 3 – do both.

I compared their grade with the average on their previous two tests.

Group 1 – grade increased 23%
Group 2 – grade increased 21%
Group 3 – grade increased 24%

There is really no significant difference in performance among the groups. The increase is the equivalent of a student averaging 75 increasing to a 92.

A confound was that almost all of Group 3 had good grades on their previous two tests so their ability to improve was very limited. So, I looked at only students who had D or F averages:

Group 1 – increase 28%
Group 2 – increase 28%

This is the equivalent of a student with a 60 average increasing to 77 – from failing to passing.

Group 3 – There was only one student with D or F in this group, but his grade increased 57%!

Since there is really no difference between the study techniques, it probably comes down to a student finally studying period and using almost any technique that requires lots of involvement with the text.

The main technique error is in barely studying the text and focusing on notes taken from the text instead. That seems to be the recipe for failure.

Read the text, read the text, read the text is the recipe for success. However, the most important ingredient for success is the student deciding to study and be successful -deciding to stop texting friends and to work at their studies!

Best regards,
Raymond Gerson

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.