In English 101 we were asked to come up with a research question pertaining to literacy and study it. I found it to be the most challenging part of the class, other than this website. Here is the basis of our question, poster, and conclusion!

Research Project

“We are studying comprehension rates of novels read in school because we are trying to find out if kids enjoy or even get around to reading mandatory novels, in order to help our audience understand if forcing reading is affective or not. We believe this to be important because the majority of us share the same experiences and want to prove that mandatory reading is wielding negative retention rates. To research this area, specifically their enjoyment of the books, we will survey freshmen here at Western Washington University, and ask them questions such as:What are the main topics? Did you enjoy the book? Would you read it again? We would also test the participants’ retention by asking questions pertaining directly to the books like who is Boo Radley? What happens at the end of Mice and Men? Who is “Big Brother”? We would also take into account the participants who don’t enjoy reading at all to keep the data from being skewed. The controlled variables in this research would be that the surveyed would be exclusively freshmen, we would ask all of the participants about the same novels, and ask the same questions about the plot.”

–Me and my groupmates

 

 

Our research showed that our participants reported negatively or indifferent about the novels they had to read. The majority of the participants did not read all of the books required of them, and used shortcut websites like sparknotes/shmoop instead. The themes of the novels showed to be retained but at the expense of the student’s preferences and/or well being. This shows a reason to change the way our educational system goes about reading comprehension.