The influence of the story impression method on narrative comprehension of junior high school remedial reading students

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the use of story impression clues would be successful in developing schema and involving students in active reading in order to increase comprehension of narrative text. Story impression clues are words or phrases taken from the story that reflect the characters, plot and setting. Subject were 46 seventh, eight and ninth grade remedial reading students. In a training session, students in the experimental group were shown how to use story clues to write an hypothesized story, use it to confirm and revise their predictions and to write a retelling using the clues. The control group hypothesized orally using the title, read the story and then wrote a retelling of the story. Over a period of six weeks both groups read four short stories, completed retellings and took a five statement inference quiz on each story. The Degrees of Reading Power (1983) test was used as a blocking variable. Analysis of variance revealed that students in the experimental group performed significantly better on the written retellings and the inference quiz than did the control group. The F ratio for the written retelling was 6.93, p $\u3c$.05. For the inference measure, the F ratio was 6.66, p $\u3c$.05. An interaction was found for story by DRP level on the written retellings (F = 3.61, p $\u3c$.05) but not for the inference measure (F = 12.23, p $\u3c$.00005). Results suggest that using the story impression method does improve comprehension. It is unclear, however, whether it is the hypothesized story, the modeling of the active reading process, the use of written retellings, the engagement in reading and writing or a combination of the above which is responsible for the improvement in comprehension