Assessing Secondary Students' Liking of Short Stories

Abstract

The development of a survey designed to assess secondary school students' liking of particular stories is explained. Through a self-study and an analysis of 169 seventh through twelfth graders' written explanations of why they liked their favorite book or story, three different aspects of lik ing were identified: liking the effects of a story, liking the expe rience of reading a story, and liking the surface features of a story. The survey operationalized these aspects of liking by asking respondents to strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree with 26 items that were designed to reflect these three different aspects of liking. An analysis using item response theory of the responses of 118 ninth through twelfth graders who were randomly assigned one of four stories after they were nested by class, sex, and ability was done to evalu ate the instrument. The respondents had similar understand ings of the items, the items remained relatively stable across trials, the spread of the items was sufficiently great to assess a range of students, and the survey had construct validity. These findings suggest that the survey implements a single variable well enough that teachers and researchers can have confidence in using it to assess secondary school students' liking of par ticular stories.