The Relationship among Reading Habit, Learning Strategies, and Academic Achievement of Taiwan Secondary School Students

Abstract

Using the data of Taiwan Assessment of Student Achievement (TASA) 2010, this study aims to explore the possible links between the 8th grade students' reading habit/engagement, learning strategies, and their academic achievement. Students participated in TASA survey received a common questionnaire and assessments in 5 subjects-Chinese, English, Math, Science, and Social study. The measured constructs of reading habit in the TASA common questionnaire involve literacy activity engagement frequency and outside-reading time spent. The constructs of learning strategies include memory, control and elaboration. The relationship among reading habit, learning strategies, and the scores of each subject are explored with different statistic analysis such as regression analysis or T-test. The results show that: (1) The girls have better reading habit than the boys with much higher frequency of engaging literacy activities, more amount of reading time and exposure of reading resources; (2) The girls are better in employing memory and control strategies than the boys; (3) The students' reading habit is correlated with learning strategies; (4) Memory strategy and reading habit can best predict 8th grade students' performance of Chinese and English, whilst control and memory strategies can predict learning outcomes of Math and Science. Overall, elaboration strategy is not suitable for predict the academic achievement of the students and which does not match the finding of PISA 2009. A continuous endeavor through education in encouraging students' reading habit, particularly the boys, and more efforts in promoting higher level learning strategies in the Taiwanese classrooms are called. Suggestions for instruction and learning, TASA assessment improvement and education policy are also provided in this paper.