Information Visualization on the Reading Comprehension for Elementary School Students in Malaysia

Abstract

Visualization strategies are strategies that utilize images to help strengthen the students' understanding of reading comprehension. Through this strategy, students will describe the meaning obtained from the text in the form of rough sketches. The use of these images allows the students to be more focused on the continuation of reading because they understand the meaning more clearly. This study aims to investigate the impact of information visualization techniques on reading comprehension performance among elementary school students in Malaysia. The study adapted quantitative study through a quasi-experimental design and survey questionnaire. 300 students from Standard 4 to Standard 6 (10 to 12 years old) were chosen as the participants of the study. They were divided into Experimental Group (n=150) and the control Group (n=150). The experiment has been done in 2 classes per week, in a total of 6 weeks. The participants in the Experimental Group were taught reading comprehension using visualization technique, while the students in the Control Group were taught using conventional method. The reading comprehension score for all the students were recorded both in pre-test and post-test. After the experiment, the students in Experimental Group were asked to answer a set of questionnaires. The finding shows that the student in the Experimental Group has higher increment in terms of their reading comprehension score compared to the students in the Control Group after the experiment. Statistical analysis of Pearson correlation found a very weak significant positive correlation between visualization technique and reading comprehension score (r=0.188, p<0.005). The analysis of Multiple Linear regression also shows that visualization technique has a small effect only on the reading comprehension score (R2=.275, R2Adj=.233, p<0.001). It was also found that there is a significant difference on the information visualization technique on the reading comprehension score based on gender. The study concludes that there are other factors that affect the students’ level of reading comprehension such as the students’ cognitive ability, and the environment of study, in which visualization technique is only a fraction in improving the reading comprehension.