The Effects of Domain Adjacency between Analogical Source and Target on Reading Comprehension of Science Texts

[[abstract]]This research aims to investigate the domain adjacency effect of the analogical materials on reading comprehension when students of diverse ages and of different levels of reading comprehension ability read science texts. This research includes three experiments. In experiment 1, the participants were 54 college students. In experiment 2, participants were 27 fourth and 27 sixth graders selected from an elementary school, and 27 seventh graders selected from a junior high school in Taipei County. All of the participants had average reading comprehension ability. In experiment 3, participants were sixth graders with high, average and low reading comprehension ability. All of the participants were from the same elementary school as that in experiment 2. In the three experiments, the within subjects variables were domain adjacency, and the Revised Reading Comprehension Test was used to explore the immediate and the one-week maintenance effects. The data obtained in this study were analyzed by MANOVA. The findings were as follows. 1. Different domain adjacency analogies used in science texts did not affect the reading comprehension performance of students at different ages or students with different levels of reading comprehension ability, and the performance did not differ with different groups either. 2. In this research, the reading performance in science texts of seventh and sixth graders were significantly better than fourth graders with average reading ability in multiple choice comprehension test in the immediate measures. 3. Regarding the immediate measures, the reading performance in science texts of sixth graders with high reading ability were significantly better than those with average and low reading ability in cued recall comprehension test. As for the maintenance measures, the sixth graders with high reading ability were better than those with low reading ability in free recall and cued recall test. 4. The reading comprehension performance in science texts between the sixth graders with high reading ability and the seventh graders with the same reading ability level were not different in the immediate measures. However, in the maintenance measures, the former was better than the latter in free recall and cued recall test.