THE EFFECT OF LEARNING CONTEXT ON THE EFFICACY OF A LITERACY INTERVENTION PROGRAM AMONG 7TH GRADE ARABIC SPEAKING PUPILS: COMPUTERIZED VS. PRINT

Fifty-one 7th grade Arabic native speaking have participated in a remedial literacy program. In addition to class instruction, the pupils were exposed to 10 literacy units, either in print (27 pupils) or computerized (24 pupils). Each unit included three reading comprehension tasks that encompassed questions about the texts content and intermediate and advanced cloze tasks. To assess the pupils’ progress, reading comprehension performance on the first and last units was compared. Two-way analysis of variance was performed with reading comprehension scores as within factor and learning context as a between subject factor. A significant main effect was only found for learning context whereas significant interaction effect was found between reading comprehension performance and learning context. Higher reading comprehension performance was observed when learning with the printed units when compared to the computerized units. Additionally, three-way analysis of variance was conducted, with performance on the different reading comprehension task types (questions about the text, intermediate cloze and advanced cloze task) as within subject factor and learning context as between subject factor. A significant main effect was found for reading comprehension task type. The results indicated that the best performance was observed on the first reading comprehension task type whereas the lowest was observed on the advanced cloze assignment. A significant interaction effect was also found between task type and learning context. Benfroni post-hoc test revealed significantly higher performance on the two cloze tasks in the printed learning context whereas no significant difference was found on the reading comprehension questions assignment between the printed and computerized learning setting.