Improving reading comprehension through the use of annotation

Lim, P. C. P. (2015). I read, I connect, I annotate. (Master’s thesis)

Background

Although Singaporean children have been observed to make routine use of the highlighter when reading a text, most of the text markings were found to be ineffective and served little purpose in helping students comprehend the reading text. However, the use of annotations is believed to have a positive impact on students’ reading comprehension scores.

Aims

The aim was to determine if the explicit teaching of making effective annotations would help students better comprehend the reading text. The author also sought to uncover the extent to which students in the middle-performing (MP) group and the low-performing (LP) group could benefit from making annotations.

Sample

The sample included 76 Primary 5 students drawn from the MP and LP classes in a primary school in Singapore. The treatment group comprised 23 MP and 16 LP students while the comparison group was made up of the remaining 22 MP and 15 LP students.

Method

This quasi-experimental study adopted a mixed-methods approach. Students from both treatment and comparison groups were administered a reading comprehension test before and after the intervention. During the intervention, participants in the treatment group were taught how to make connections between the text they were reading and their prior knowledge and between different parts of the text. Students in the comparison group continued with their regular comprehension instruction with their English teachers. At the end of the intervention, 11 students from the two groups were interviewed to ascertain their views about the intervention. The students’ completed worksheets and test results were also analysed.

Findings

Statistical results revealed that participants in the treatment group achieved a greater increase in scores from pre-test to post-test as compared to their counterparts in the comparison group. This observed increase was found to be statistically significant, and was further supported by qualitative findings from the interviews and document study. Taken together, the findings suggested an improvement in the treatment group’s ability to make better and more complex connections while reading. A comparison of post-test means indicated a very large effect size for LP students, suggesting that the intervention benefitted the LP students more than their HP counterparts.

Implications

The author emphasized the need for students to be explicitly taught how to make effective text markings and to annotate for connections that foster comprehension. She urged educators to strike a better balance between making connections in interactive reading and the answering of comprehension questions.

Original thesis retrieved from NIE Digital Repository