Children's Reading Achievement as a Function of Varying Specificity of Purpose Setting Directions / Margaret B. Jones.

This study was designed to confirm the hypothesis that objectives which focused on items of information best facilitated reading retention among a population of elementary school children while controlling for the children's reading level rather than for the "density" of the reading passage. Two 550-word reading passages taken from "Life in the Ancient World" were rewritten to conform to sixth-grade readability levels. Alternate form reliability was established in a preliminary investigation in which cloze tests constructed from both passages were administered to a group of 45 sixth graders. It was concluded that, given the design of this study, neither specific nor general reading directions influenced the level of reading achievement. It may be that sixth-grade children just have not yet developed the reading skills necessary to use reading directions of the type provided in this experiment. For these children, purpose setting directions which are facilitative may be those which are discussed, verbalized, or in some manner internalized, rather than those presented in a list. (RB)

Microfiche. [Washington D.C.]: ERIC Clearinghouse microfiches : positive.