| Summary: | 碩士 === 明道大學 === 課程與教學研究所 === 101 === Developed by Stauffer, the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA) strategy was used for predicting, reading and proving. The aim of this study was to explore the effects of the DR-TA strategy instruction on critical thinking abilities and dispositions on 4th grade elementary students.
This study adopted quasi-experimental research method. An experiment with the nonequivalent pretest-posttest control group designs was conducted. These participants were 4th graders in two classes drawn from an elementary school where the researcher work in Chang-hua County. They were selected by using the purposive sampling methods, and assigned into two groups. Sixteen students in the experimental group received the DR-TA strategy instruction two class periods per week for eight weeks, while fifteen students in the control group received the traditional reading instruction.
Before the experimental instruction, the participants were divided into three groups, namely low, medium and high reading comprehension abilities according to “Reading Comprehension Screening Test”. Besides, the researcher edited “Critical Thinking Ability Test” and “Critical Thinking Disposition Appraisal” which were applied to the experimental and control groups for pretest and posttest. To examine the effect of the DR-TA strategy instruction, the Statistical Package for the Social Science version 19.0 was employed for the statistical analyses. The quantitative data were analyzed by Mann-Whitney test, Wilcoxon signed ranks test, Kruskal-Wallis test, point-biserial correlation, and Spearman rank order correlation coefficient.
The results indicated as follows:
1. There was no significant difference between the experimental group and the controll group on the 4th graders’ critical thinking abilities and critical thinking dispositions.
2. The DR-TA strategy instruction and the traditional reading instruction had the significant advancement on students’ critical thinking abilities, but neither of them was not significantly affect students’ critical thinking dispositions.
3. The DR-TA strategy instruction couldn’t significantly improved critical thinking dispositions of those students who were from different background variables. However, critical thinking abilities of the girls and the medium reading comprehension abilities students significantly improved by this instruction.
4. Neither critical thinking abilities nor critical thinking dispositions was significantly related with the 4th graders’ background variables.
Finally, the implication of these results were discussed, and some suggestions were provided for educational authorities, elementary school teachers, and the study direction in the future.
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