Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

A study of the effects of summer vacation activities on the reading ability of elementary school children

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  • The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not there was any change in reading achievement level of elementary school children during the summer vacation, and whether or not identifiable factors existed that may have accounted for these changes. Children in the first through fifth grades in three elementary schools in Corvallis, Oregon were give-pi the Word Reading and Paragraph Meaning sub-tests of the Stanford Achievement Test during the week prior to the last week of school in the spring. Another form of the same test was administered to these same students during the second week of school in the fall. Scores from the two tests for 383 children were then analyzed to compare gain in reading achievement during the summer vacation in terms of the total group tested, boys as compared to girls, grade levels, reading ability (as indicated by pre-test score), and summer reading activities. A matched-pair study was conducted using the children who attended summer school as the experimental group and children who did not attend summer school as the control group. The scores obtained by these two groups were then analyzed to determine if there was a significant difference in reading gain or loss during the summer. A questionnaire was completed in the fall by the children regarding their participation in summer activities. The responses of the children making the most gain in reading achievement during the summer vacation were compared with the responses of the children who made the least gain to determine if there was a relationship between summer activity and reading achievement. Findings and Conclusions Application of the t statistic to the mean differences between pre-test and post-test reading scores showed that a statistically significant loss at the . 05 level of about one-tenth of a year in reading achievement occurred during the summer. No significant difference was found between the mean scores of the boys and the girls. Analysis of the mean difference scores for each of the five grade levels using the one-way F-ratio indicated no significant difference between grades. Students receiving the lowest scores on the pre-test appeared to make more gains than the students making the highest scores when the results of a chi-square test of independence were analyzed in all grade levels and both sub-tests except for grades two and three on the Word Reading sub-test. The chi- square test of independence that was applied to the responses on the questionnaire by the group making the most gains when compared to the group making the least gains indicated that more high-gain students had read more than ten books during the summer than the low-gain group. The tow-gain group had taken more extended trips than the high-gain group. The t statistic for small correlated samples used with the matched-pair study showed that there was no significant difference between the summer reading achievement loss of the experimental group that attended summer school and a control group that did not attend.
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