This paper introduces a new affective instrument for assessing the reader self-perceptions of students in grades seven through ten. The Reader Self-Perception Scale 2 (RSPS2) builds upon its predecessor, the RSPS, a tool that measures the reading efficacy beliefs of children in grades four through six. New items were created for the RSPS2 to reflect differences in the expectations for adolescent reading. The instrument was piloted on 488 students, revised, and then validates with an additional 2,542 students in the target grades. Factor analytic procedures revealed four factors emerging on the RSPS2. Items for Progress, Observational Comparison, Social Feedback, and Physiological States clustered as expected into scales with reliabilities ranging from .87 to .95. The article includes a description of the instrument, an explanation of its possible uses in assessment, instruction, and research, as well as directions for administration, scoring, and interpretation.
To learn maximally from texts centering on controversial topics, readers must suspend attitudinal biases in the interest of objectivity. The present study examines the extent to which issue-related attitudes influence readers' comprehension and retention of information presented in an impartial text. It expands upon previous research that has yielded equivocal findings by considering readers' (a) ego-involvement with the issue, (b) prior knowledge, and (c) purpose for reading. In an immediate and delayed recall phase, readers opposing nuclear power were compared with those not opposed to it on a series of dependent measures that involved either low-level outcomes or judgmental tasks. No effect of issue-related attitude was found for the selective encoding or recall of low-level data; however, when open-ended questions required readers to make summative text-based decisions about the issues, their protocols exhibited attitude-consistent response tendencies in the immediate learning phase. The findings are explained in terms of differences in the nature of post-reading tasks and reader's perceptions of intrinsic and extrinsic goals.
lthough the highly popular Accelerated Reader (AR) book reading incentive program claims to motivate children of all reading ability levels, very little independent empirical research has examined this assertion. To help fill this void, we used two related three-factor mixed designs with Method (AR vs. Control), Gender; and either Grade Level (fourth vs. fifth) or Reading Ability (high vs. low) to explore AR's influence on the reading attitudes and self-perceptions of children intwo comparable school districts. The analyses indicatethat ARpositively influenced academic reading attitudes, but not recreational ones, and that it negatively influenced two types of self-perceptions in low achieving male readers. These findings and others ofconsequence arediscussed along with implications for future research.
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