The Effect of Online Reciprocal Teaching on Fourth Grade Primary School Students’ Reading Comprehension Skills and Reading Motivation

Abstract

This 9-week mixed-methods study aimed to examine the effect of online reciprocal teaching on fourth grade primary school students’ (N = 30) reading comprehension skills and reading motivation. As data collection tools, the “Reading Comprehension Test” was used to determine students’ reading comprehension levels, while the “Motivation for Reading Questionnaire” was used to determine their reading motivation. Students gave their views on the implementation in a “semi-structured interview form” prepared by the researcher. In the research, within the scope of the quantitative data, arithmetic mean, standard deviation, and t-test were used for the analysis of the data obtained from the pretest and posttest administrations of the reading comprehension test and motivation for reading questionnaire. The qualitative data of the research were analyzed with the “content analysis” technique. It was concluded that the online reciprocal teaching strategies improved students’ reading comprehension skills, while the strategies did not make a difference in students’ intrinsic motivation but increased their extrinsic motivation. According to the findings obtained in the qualitative part of the study, students stated that their vocabulary improved, that they understood the texts they read more easily, and that while they had the most difficulty in the summarizing strategy, they found the predicting strategy to be the simplest. Furthermore, it was concluded that group work increased students’ behaviors such as cooperation and collaboration, whereas they had difficulty in making joint decisions. Some suggestions are made in the light of the study results for researchers and practitioners.