Comparing the effect of teaching transactional strategies, providing effective feedback and common practice on students’ reading comprehension

This study was conducted with the aim of investigating and comparing the effect of transactional strategies, providing effective feedback and using a combination of these two methods on improving the comprehension performance of the fifth-grade students as a complex mixed design with two inter-subject factors “type of education and gender” and an intra-subject factor “test”. The research population included Arāk city fifth grade male and female students and the research sample was selected by multi-stage cluster sampling method from 8 schools and one class from each school (all in all four classes of females and 4 classes of males). Comprehension performance was measured using the publishable questions of PIRLS 2016 study. The validity of the instrument was confirmed by experts and the reliability coefficient was obtained 0.83 by calculating Cronbach's alpha. After conducting the pre-test, the necessary training was provided for the teachers of the participating classes in 12 sessions. They instructed students for 10 weeks according to the instruction of each method, and the control group was instructed using the conventional method of schools. Then, all students participated in the post-test and 6 weeks later in the follow-up test. Data were analyzed by two-factor analysis of variance with repeated measures. The results showed that all three applied instructional methods had a significant effect on improving students’ comprehension performance (p<0.0001). Significance of the interaction between teaching methods and gender (P<0.5) showed that although students’ gender did not affect their comprehension performance (p=0.179), but the combined teaching method had an enormous effect on females’ performance. The results of follow-up test showed that the continuity of effectiveness of the applied methods was acceptable and the scores of post-tests and follow-up ones were not significantly different.