The impact of developing thinking skills on pupils' reading comprehension

Abstract

The present study aims at examining the research hypothesis that if thinking skills are to be developed then pupils are to develop better texts’ reading comprehension. The research questions that this study aims to answer; does teaching thinking skills has any impact on improving pupils’ comprehension of written materials? In other words, how much effective is the relationship between thinking skills and reading comprehension? This research work consists of four chapters, chapters one and two present a review of the related literature. Chapters three and four introduce the practical part of the study. For the nature of this research, a quasi-experimental quantitative design has been used. A practical experiment has been conducted to investigate first year pupils that study at Omar Idriss Secondary School in the region of El-Kantara in Biskra. Pupils of control and experimental conditions have been pre-tested and post tested using the same measurements used in the pilot study. Then progress is measured after the treatment has been completed. As for the research tools used in this study, pupils and teachers’ questionnaires have been piloted to eliminate any doubtfulness in items’ wording. A variety of tables and diagrams is used to show differences in the pupils’ performance in the thinking skills and the reading comprehension tests. The descriptive and inferential statistics (correlation ‘r’) showed very significant results in the comparison made between the groups’ scores. The analysis of the data collected throughout the study, as well as the interpretation of teachers’ and pupils’ questionnaires proved the effective impact of improving thinking skills have on enhancing pupils’ texts comprehension. At the end, we mentioned some pedagogical implications that reflect outcomes of the research and recommendations to further researches.