Impacts of cooperative learning and a teacher-directed approach on the reading achievement of socio-economically disadvantaged students

Research has documented that socio-economically disadvantaged students (SEDSs) lag behind in reading when compared with their counterparts from privileged backgrounds. Although well-designed instructional interventions could improve students’ reading achievement, what is still unknown is which pedagogical approach could improve the reading of SEDSs especially in the context of a developing nation. We compared the effects of two different approaches that contain metacognitive reading strategies with the conventional teaching method on the reading achievement (comprehension and vocabulary) of students with low socio-economic status. We adopted a non-randomized pretest–posttest control group design. One hundred and twenty-eight students from three community secondary schools participated in the study. Data were collected with a teacher-made reading achievement test. Using the mixed repeated-measures ANOVA, findings indicated no significant differences in their reading achievement across groups, though similar significant improvements were observed within groups. Gender also showed a significant main effect only on the comprehension achievement of the students showing that female students did better than their male counterparts in comprehension achievement. Results did not show a significant interaction effect between gender and method. It was concluded that the students’ reading achievement could be improved in the three approaches.