The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of Scholastic, Incorporated's
ReadAbout software system on student achievement in the subject of reading. The study
assessed the relationship between the amount of time third and fourth grade students
spent utilizing the program and their scale scores on the Texas Assessment of
Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) reading test, as reported in student records of third and
fourth graders at Comal Independent School District, Texas. Additionally, the study
attempted to determine possible differences among students for the variables of gender,
primary language of learning, and socio-economic status, as reported in student records
of third and fourth graders at Comal Independent School District, Texas.
For the purpose of this study, school and student performance analysis included
only the nine elementary schools in the Comal Independent School District that served
third and fourth grade students during the 2007-2008 school year. The student population under study consisted of a total of 585 third graders and 792 fourth graders
(1377 total students).
The research findings of this study include the following:
1. There was a statistically significant relationship between the amount of time
that both third grade and fourth grade students spent using the ReadAbout
software system and their performance on the third and fourth grade TAKS
reading tests.
2. No statistically significant relationships were determined for gender or socioeconomic
status when the amount of time individuals in each subpopulation
spent using ReadAbout and the students' TAKS reading test scale scores were
compared. However, in the analysis for primary language of learning, a small
group of Spanish-speaking students who used ReadAbout for more than 16.5
hours prior to taking the test outperformed their English-speaking peers in the
same usage category, and this difference did prove to be statistically
significant.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-08-7216 |
| Date | 14 January 2010 |
| Creators | McGlothlin, Ross M. |
| Contributors | Hoyle, John, Collier, Virginia |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
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