Children's Comprehension of High- and Low-Interest Material and a Comparison of Two Cloze Scoring Methods. Technical Report No. 17.

The present study investigated children's comprehension of reading material which was of either highor low-interest. Previous research indicates that children comprehend more of highthan low-interest material when each child is given a mixture of both types of material. This effect could be due to a contrast effect whereby children selectively respond to the more appealing passages in their set of passages. In the present study each child received either all high-interest passages or all low-interest passages but not both. Fifth grade children's interests were assessed using a picture rating technique. One week later each child read cloze passages corresponding to the child's highest or lowest rated topics. Children's cloze responses were scored by the typical exact replacement method and by a method which included synonyms as correct. Results were that children comprehended more of highthan low-interest material, suggesting that the interest effect is not dependent on a contrast phenomenon. Synonym production data indicated that highachieving children generated more synonyms than low-achieving children ahd that boys produced more synonyms thangirls. In contrast to the 6ft-stated.conclusion in the literature, there appears to be some informational value of scoring synonyms as correct. Chil dren's Comprehension 2 Children's Comprehension of Highand Low-Interest Material and a Comparison of Two Cloze Scoring Methods Recent evidence indicates that children's reading comprehension is affected by their level of interest in the content of the material (Asher and Markell, 1974). Fifth-grade children's interests were individually assessed using a picture-rating technique. Children rated the interest value of each of 25 photographic slides. One week later each child received six passages, three of which corresponded to his or her highly-rated topics, and three of which corresponded to topics that were rated low. All passages were presented in cloze format (Taylor, 1953) with every fifth word deleted. The child's task was to read the passage and replace each of the missing words. Asher and Markell's findings indicated that girls' reading performance was slightly affected by their interest in the reading material and that boys' performance was strongly affected by the interest level of the material. On low-interest material and on a school-administered reading achievement test, boys performed significantly poorer than girls. However, on the high-interest material the sex difference was eliminated. These results have potentially important implications for the assessment of children's reading ability; giving children passages of low interest may seriously underestimate some children's ability to gain information from written material. Children's Comprehension 3 The research methodology in the Asher and Markell study represents an advance over earlier investigations of the effect of interest on reading comprehension. One element is the individualized assessment of children's interests independent of any particular reading material. In one study (Schnayer, 1967), children's interest in a topic was measured after they read a passage on that topic and had been tested for comprehension. This procedure confounds the reading comprehension measure with the interest assessment procedure. Children's interest reports could be a function of either their comprehension of the material or its topic appeal. In other studies, normative data on children's interests have been used to select passages (Bernstein, 1955; Klein, 1969; Stanchfield, 1967). Since individual children's interests differ from group norms (e.g. not all boys like basketball), using group norms instead of individual assessment introduces considerable experimental