Open Education and Reading Comprehension of High‐ability and Low‐ability Elementary School Pupils

Abstract

Summary. Effects of open education on reading comprehension assignments involving both high inference and low inference items were assessed. Seven hundred and thirty‐three primary school children stratified by instructional methods, grade levels, and cognitive ability participated in the study. Open education pupils of both higher and lower IQ levels manifested higher performance than students of traditional classes on all four reading comprehension subtests employed. Differences between instructional methods were more pronounced, the higher the level of inference required. However, no cumulative effects of more prolonged exposure to open education were found. The results are discussed in terms of implementation of open education methods.

Individualised Instruction, Congruent Authority Structure and Student Outcomes

“…The instrument consisted of two parallel forms of 25 items each. A former study indicated that the correlation between this measure and a reading comprehension test was r = 0.64 (Eshel et al, 1987). The correlation between the two forms of this test was r = 0.96.…”