the reading practices and study behaviors of developmental and nontraditional community college...

8/14/2019 The Reading Practices and Study Behaviors of Developmental and Nontraditional Community College Students

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Reading Practices / 1

The Reading Practices and Study Behaviors of Developmental and Nontraditional

Community College Students

M Cecil Smith

Robert J. Keller

Department of Educational Psychology,Counseling and Special Education

Northern Illinois UniversityDeKalb, Il 60115

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Mid-Western Educational Research

Association, Chicago, IL, October 13-16, 1993.


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The Reading Practices and Study Behaviors of Developmental and Nontraditional

Community College Students

The purpose of the study was to examine the everyday reading practices andstudy-related reading behaviors of a sample of community college students. This research

was motivated, in part, by the need to examine college students' general reading andstudying-related reading activities. Also, there is a little research on adults' everydayreading behaviors and how these behaviors relate to their academic, work-related, andpersonal achievements.

The second author teaches at the community college where the study wasconducted. Many of his students possess characteristics that put them at risk for academicfailure: poor academic preparation and performance in high school; lack of appropriatestudy skills; and low test scores. In attempting to assist his students in developing theirreading and study skills and to improve their test preparedness, he was struck by theapparent lack of research on community college students' reading and studying activities.We have, in fact, found no research examining reading and study practices of communitycollege adults, and the relationship between reading practice and academic success amongsuch students. Community college students represent a different population thanuniversity undergraduates, on which most study skills and reading research has beenconducted. That research, while informative, may not be directly applicable in assistingcommunity college students with their study skills.

We also want to describe a specific method that we used to obtain readingbehavior data among our subjects. This method, we believe, has potentially widespreadapplication for both educational researchers and practitioners, including those concernedwith assessing and developing students' reading and study skills.

Previous research has evaluated the effects of study skills programs (Hughes &Graham, 1992), particularly those that teach techniques such as SQ3R, or more recently,provide metacognitive strategy instruction (Aaronson, 1987; O'Neill, 1992). These

interventions have focused on enhancing students' reading comprehension rather thanpromoting reading practices, however. Previous research has also shown that older andbetter-educated adults exhibit more diversity in their reading practices and the types ofreading which they do, tend to be more motivated to engage in reading tasks, and havemore positive attitudes towards reading than do younger, less-educated adults (Guthrie,Seifert, & Kirsch, 1986; Smith & Stahl, 1993). We expected, then, that there would beinteresting differences in reading practices among our subjects.

Sample-15 older (mean age = 31.3 years) nontraditional students;-returning to college to improve their work-related skills;

-entering or returning to college after a lengthy break from schooling;-taking a study skills course as an elective.-33 younger (mean age = 20.6 years) developmental studies students who lacked

the basic skills necessary for success in college (many of these Ss were athletes);-scored below criterion levels on the ACT and the Nelson-Denny Reading Test.-required to take a study skills course.-All of the students were enrolled in the study skills course taught by the second

author.


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The study skills course focused on:-how to read textbooks (e.g., digesting information, identifying main ideas),-listening and notetaking skills, and-the SQ3R studying method.

Periodically, students were tested over their mastery of these skills. The class met once

per week for 16 weeks.Another aspect of the course focused on developing effective time managementskills. In order to provide students with a relatively simple method for determining howeffectively they used their study time, Keller had students keep a daily record of theirstudying and reading activities. The underlying rationale here was that this activity wouldprovide an objective account of the amount of time that students spent preparing for classassignments, tests, and the like.

A variant of the Reading Activity Method (RAM) diary was used to gather dataon students study reading. The RAM diary methodology is based on time use researchwhich has examined relationships between personal well-being and the ways in whichpeople allocate their time among various everyday activities (Robinson, 1985).

Time use diaries, such as RAM, offer several advantages:-allow events to be recorded as they happen, or immediately afterwards, so

forgetting is avoided;-depending upon how they are structured, diaries can provide quite comprehensive

data-provide data which could otherwise only be obtained via observation or interview.

Observation is costly. Interviews are constrained by the limitations of subjects' memories.Generally, diary data is more valid and reliable than interview or questionnaire instruments(Carp & Carp, 1981).

Several problems have also been noted concerning time diary methodology, not allof which we addressed in this study. These problems include:

-diaries require extensive and long-term cooperation of the part of Ss;

-social desirability may arise as a mitigating factor affecting the validity of the data.Students recorded the following information in their reading diaries:

-day/date-time of day-reading source-setting (where reading occurs, e.g., home, work, library)-amount of time spent reading (total number of minutes)-volume of reading (total number of pages)-purpose for reading (e.g., work, school, leisure)-rating of enjoyment for each reading source (5="very enjoyable").

Students were assigned to keep these diaries for 12 weeks of the 15 week semester. They

were encouraged to record all of their reading, including not only for school, but for otherpurposes as well (e.g., work, personal reasons). An explicit expectation was that much ofstudents' reading would be school-related. Four times over the semester in-classdiscussions concerned the contents of students' RAM diaries. The students were taughthow to examine changes or to look for trends in their reading activities based on theinformation that they noted in their RAM diaries. For example, it was expected that,around test times, school-related reading (e.g., textbooks) would be clearly evident overpersonal or leisure reading.


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ResultsNontraditional (NT) students recorded their reading activity for an average of 30

days over the semester and the developmental (DV) for an average of only 21 days. Thisdifference was significant, t=7.38, df=46, p < .01. Another telling difference between thetwo groups was that the DV Ss recorded an average of 29 reading events for the 12 week

period, while NT Ss recorded an average of 130 reading events. This indicates that theNT Ss were more vigilant and conscientious in recording their reading activity than werethe DV Ss.

We next looked at mean differences in Ss' reading time per reading event. Here,differences were small, but approached significance (p = .052). DV Ss read an average of42.24 minutes (s.d.=30.61) per event, while NT Ss read an average of 43.46 minutes(s.d.=42.09) per event. This indicates that subjects were either reading more than one textsource per any reading event (and failed to record these events separately), or weredevoted lengthy periods of time to the study of a single text source.

We then examined mean differences in reading volume (e.g., number of pagesread) per reading event. Here, significant differences were obtained favoring the DV Ss,F=2.89 (1, 150), p < .01. DV Ss read an average of 30.24 pages (s.d.=80.95) per event,while NT Ss read an average of 26.40 pages (s.d.=47.65) per event. Given the largestandard deviations on this dependent variable, we are led to question the accuracy or carewith which students--especially the DV Ss--recorded their reading volume.

Other differences have not been analyzed to date, but we plan to look at thespecific sources of materials students read, in what settings they did most of their reading,as well as for what specific purposes. We suspect that other interesting differencesbetween the two groups will emerge.

DiscussionOur discussion of the effects of using the RAM diaries to promote students'

reading activities and study habits is limited to impressionistic data derived from classdiscussions with and observations of students. Generally speaking, the RAM diaries

appeared to be of more benefit to the NT Ss than to the DV Ss. The NT Ss approachedthe RAM task more seriously, and more vigilant in recording their reading activity, andthen using this data to make changes in their reading and studying practices than did theDV Ss. The DV Ss appeared to view the study skills course as two credit hours of an"easy A", and so were less motivated to engage in an activity in which they saw littlevalue.

Such behavioral differences are likely due to maturation and different long andshort-term goals between the two groups. We haven't looked at this yet, but we suspectthat students were more likely to record their reading a few days prior to scheduled classdiscussions of their reading activity or prior to examinations. This is suggested by the factthat, on average, NT Ss recorded for only 36% of the total possible semester days, and

DV Ss recorded for only 25% of the total possible days.We believe that the RAM diary is a useful tool for examining students' everyday

reading and study-related reading activities. Data contained in the diaries can be useful inteacher-student conferences, for example, or useful in tracking changes in studyingbehavior over the course of a semester. However, more work needs to be done todevelop methods for assisting students in using the information in their diaries in wayswhich will help foster more effective reading and studying skills and habits. The issue ofsocial desirability in responses remains a vexing problem, but may be ameliorated for de-


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emphasizing any implied evaluative aspects of the RAM diary.Finally, more research is needed which examines the reading activities, studying

skills, and test preparation abilities of community college students. These students tend tobe at great risk for academic failure, but little is known about how they differ fromuniversity students.


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References

Aaronson. S. (1987). Metacognitive dialogue: A strategy to increase levels ofprocessing among community college students. Research & Teaching inDevelopmental Education, 3, 4-11.

Carp, F.M., & Carp, A. (1981). The validity, reliability, and generalizability of diary data.Experimental Aging Research, 7, 281-296.

Guthrie, J.T., Seifert, M., & Kirsch, I.S. (1986). Effects of education, occupation, and

setting on reading practices. American Educational Research Journal, 23, 151-160.

Hughes, J.A., & Graham, S.W. (1992). Academic performance and backgroundcharacteristics among community college transfer students. Community Junior-College Quarterly of Research and Practice, 16, 35-46.

O'Neill, S.P. (1992). Metacognitive strategies and reading achievement amongdevelopmental students in an urban community college. Reading-Horizons, 32,316-330.

Robinson, J.P. (1985). The validity and reliability of diaries versus alternative time usemeasures. In F.T. Juster & F.P. Stafford (Eds.), Time, goods, and well-being (pp.33-61). Ann Arbor, MI: Survey Research Center-ISR.

Smith, M C., & Stahl, N.A. (1993, April). Adults' reading practices and activities: Age,educational, and occupational effects. Paper presented at the annual meeting ofthe American Educational Research Association. Atlanta, GA.

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