An investigation of the use of three prereading strategies on the comprehension of junior high school students

Two purposes of this study were to determine what impact, if any, three prereading strategies (Cognitive Organizer-CO, Structured Overview-SO, and Directed Reading Questions--DRQ) had on improving (a) content comprehension and (b) literal, inferential and total reading skill comprehension. The study attempted to determine whether each strategy had an impact in individual comprehension areas. The study also investigated the impact of the three strategies within the categories of race, sex, and age. It was hypothesized that there would be a statistically significant difference in the content comprehension change, the literal reading skill change, the inferential reading skill change, and the total comprehension change (from pretest to posttest) between the experimental groups (CO, SO, and DRQ) and the control group. Eighth grade junior high school students in a predominantly black school were randomly selected and assigned to three treatment groups (CO, SO, and DRQ) and a control group. Three major hypotheses which related to each general hypothesis were formulated. In each instance the impact of one of the three prereading strategies on an aspect of comprehension was investigated. Three subhypotheses which measured individual strategy impact variations for categories of race, sex, and age were investigated for each major hypothesis. [...]