Do Advanced Readers Miss More Words than Beginner Readers?

Overview

Objectives/Goals A national study found that more than one-third of youths incarcerated at the average age of 15.5 read below the 4th grade level (Project READ, 1978). Statistics like these show the importance of reading research. The researcher's project is "Do Advanced Readers Miss More Words than Beginner Readers?" I did this science project because I wanted to learn more about how reading and the mind works. When I first read this "sentence" I was only able to detect three "Fs" even though I had read all the "of" words. I suspected that other advanced readers would experience the same phenomenon. I thought that advanced readers would have a tendency to disregard the word "of" because it has minimal value or meaning in the English language. Therefore, beginner readers would be more likely to detect the "Fs" more often. I thought this about beginners because they have not read for as long of a period of time and have had less time for their minds to have learned to disregard the word "of" as important. Another aspect that I wanted to analyze in this project was to see if age and time had an effect on the outcome. I chose to do this science fair project because the further knowledge about reading is so important to mankind. Methods/Materials Tested 20 beginner readers (5th Graders. Younger readers were unable to follow directions accurately) and 20 advanced readers (Readers for at least 10 years.) Asked the subjects to read the following sentence out loud: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE- SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF- IC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERINCE OF YEARS. Asked the subjects to count how many F's there are in the sentence. After the testings were done the data was analyzed and evaluated. Results After looking at all of the data the researcher discovered that beginner and advanced readers came out the same in detecting the word "of". Conclusions/Discussion The statistical analysis of the data collected in this project that tested which group detected the word "of" the best showed the hypothesis was incorrect because the readers of both groups both averaged exactly the same in detecting the letter "F".

Competition history

• CSEF 2003 Behavioral Sciences · Entry J0332

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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