The Top Ten

This year in the 5th grade they were able to participate in a science fair. Gracie was really excited about her science experiment.

Purpose: Does reading something yourself help you remember more of what you read, or do you have better retention when you hear it read?

Hypothesis: I think that most people will do better if they read it themselves. I think this because I remember things better if I read about it myself. People can be similar so they might be like me.

Procedure: First, I will read a story about Benjamin Franklyn to ten people and they will take a test on that information.

Next, the same ten people will read the story about Thomas Edison and take a test on what they read.

Each test will have 15 questions. The tests will have the same amount of multiple choice, fill in the blank & true/false question sets.

I will reverse the procedure with an additional group of ten people. I will read them the story of Thomas Edison and they will read the story of Benjamin Franklyn. Tests will be taken after each story.

I will correct the tests for each group.

Finally I will average the scores for both the reading and the listening tests and see what score is higher, the one for the reading or listening.

Results: Giving the tests to two different groups really gave me a bigger variety of scores. The first group, as a whole, did better on the listening test and the second group did better on the reading test.

It was interesting to see that the average reading score was 11.15 out of 15 @ 74%. The average listening score was 10.6 @ 70%.

Conclusion: I thought that the scores for the reading would be higher and they were. However, there was a lot smaller gap between the scores.

It seems that different people will learn better in different ways. Some people seem to have better listening comprehension than reading comprehension, but I think they are the minority.

Next Time: If I were to do more research on this topic I would survey a lot larger group. I am still confident that with more subjects the spread would increase. I would set a lot more controls in place. I would make sure that the test subjects had the same skill set for listening and reading. I would also eliminate the possibility of distractions. I think it would also be interesting to see if there was a reward for higher scores if people would try harder.

Gracie got an Honorable Mention as one of the top 10 in her grade. We were very proud of her.