Using Thinking Maps for Developing Some Reading Comprehension Skills of Secondary School Students

Abstract

El-Nahrawy, Zainab Ismail Mahmoud. Using Thinking Maps for Developing Some Reading Comprehension Skills of Secondary School Students. M.A. thesis. Faculty of Girls, Ain Shams University, 2014. The present study aimed at investigating the effectiveness of Thinking Maps in developing the reading comprehension skills of first year secondary school students. Two first year secondary classes were randomly selected from Basyoun Secondary for Girls in the academic year 2012-2013. One class was taught through a strategy based on Thinking Maps to represent the experimental and the other class received regular instruction to represent the control groups. A pre-post reading comprehension test was given to both groups before and after the treatment. The results provided support for the hypotheses of the study and showed evidence that there were statistically significant differences at 0.05 level between the mean scores of the experimental group students and the control group students on the reading comprehension post-test in favor of the experimental group. Besides, this showed improvement in the experimental group students' performance on the reading comprehension pre-post test in favor of the post-test. It was concluded that the strategy based on Thinking Maps proved to be effective in developing first year secondary school stage students' reading comprehension skills. Key Words: Thinking Maps, Reading Comprehension