Effects of the development of reading comprehension questions on learning improvement

Abstract

The process of teaching and learning to read has evolved in recent decades from an act focused on the decoding action to a task of interaction between the reader and the text in which the reader's knowledge, goals and interests play an important role. In this sense, the importance of acquiring both specific vocabulary and reading skills will enable the mastery of communicative conventions relevant to a specific context. The achievement of the skills and competences necessary for academic and professional success implies that students take an active role in the text in order to acquire coherent meaning from their reading. In contrast to this fact, the reality is that the diversity of resources used in the classroom with students to exercise reading comprehension tends to focus on providing answers to a series of questions, preferably of a literal nature, through school texts. However, little work has been done on how students access textual information through teaching proposals that demand active learning and stimulate the ability to think through expository texts in different languages (Spanish and English). The aim of this study was to compare the level of written comprehension of two groups of students in the fifth year of Primary Education, one that worked on the elaboration of questions of different types by using texts present in everyday life in a cooperative way and another that exercised written comprehension, with the same texts, by answering different questions given by the teachers. A total of 116 students between 10 and 11 years old (M = 10.62; SD = 0.43) participated in the study, of whom 48.7% were boys and 51.3% girls. The data collected give special relevance to this type of methodologies for the improvement of reading, so this teaching model is recommended for facilitating the learning of reading comprehension at different educational levels.