Reading attitudes of 4th grade students in primary school: an evaluation on different school levels

Abstract

Attitude has a significant impact on behavior and success. Attitude cannot be observed directly but it is possible to see the results of an attitude. Reading attitude also has a special importance in terms of results of the students in reading processes. The aim of this study is to examine whether the reading attitudes of the 4th grade students differ according to variables such as gender, school level and socio-economic level. 340 students (184 of them are girls, 156 of them are boys) were enrolled in this study and they were selected by stratified sampling method. In order to determine the reading attitudes of primary school students, the Garfield Visual Reading Attitude Scale that was developed by McKenna and Kear (1990) and adapted to Turkish by Kocaarslan (2016) was used. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was calculated as 0.77 for the Garfield Visual Reading Attitude Scale. In data analysis one-way MANOVA was used; t-test was used to determine whether there was a significant difference between two groups and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare more than two groups. According to findings of the study, there were significant differences between the reading attitude scores of the female students and male students in favor of the female students. In addition to this it was concluded that the reading attitudes of the students in higher schools were higher. In terms of socio-economic level, it is observed that the reading attitudes of the students in upper socio-economic level are higher.