Date of Award
6-1-1990
Document Type
Thesis - NSU Access Only
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Center for the Advancement of Education
Keywords
Reading Program, Computer Assisted Reading Contest, Individualized Reading, Elementary and Secondary Reading Skills and Vocabulary.
Abstract
The excessive failure to read during leisure time rate among the author's sixth reading classes was addressed by the Implementation of an computerized independent reading contest. The author used two theories, the computerized reading contest provides every student the opportunity to read and enter answers to questions independently improves reading skills and increase vocabulary and that every student, regardless of ability, can participate in the computer reading program. Fred Writer (Rogers, 1985) was modified to design a computer program to encourage middle school students to read during their leisure time. The students were encouraged on a weekly basis to visit the school library to locate books on the contest list and to find answers to the questions on the list. It was the author's goals that 75 per cent of the students would associate leisure time reading with academic achievement and see an improved Interest ln leisure time reading, and 50 per cent of the students would increase their reading comprehension level, vocabulary, inferencing skills, and context clue skills each by 10 per cent. All of these goals were not attained. It should be noted, however, that the group which elected to enter the contest appeared to enjoy the books they read and the challenge of the contest and did achieve some improvement in scores. The new learning for-mat may have frustrated some students. Further study should be undertaken to continue the assessment of the value of the modified computer program. It appeared that the difference in achievement in the study happened by chance, but that these aforementioned reading skills can be improved by the computerized reading contest.