The role of attribution beliefs, motivation and strategy use in Chinese fifth-graders' reading comprehension

Abstract

Background: The latest report by the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), issued in 2006, indicated that Hong Kong Primary 4 Chinese students outperformed children from 45 countries and provinces in reading comprehension tests that measured their higher-order reading proficiency. However, the study gave no indication of how factors such as attribution beliefs, motivation and strategy use might contribute to reading proficiency.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine the relationships between students' implicit beliefs about intelligence and ability, i.e. their ‘attribution beliefs’, and their motivation, metacognitive awareness of reading strategies and reading comprehension.

Sample: The subjects consisted of 120 Grade 5 Chinese students (55 boys and 65 girls) from one Hong Kong primary school that uses Chinese as the medium of instruction. The school represents a typical primary school located in a Hong Kong urban area, with most students coming from low-income families. There was a wide range of academic ability and the average age of the students was 12.2 years.

Design and methods: A quantitative approach was adopted in the research. Students were required to complete three questionnaires and two reading comprehension tests. The three questionnaires measured students' implicit beliefs about intelligence and ability, and their self-reported motivation and metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. The reading comprehension tests measured students' higher-order reading proficiency. Multiple regression analysis techniques were used to examine the relationship between students' beliefs and motivation, metacognitive awareness of reading strategies, and how they predicated students' reading comprehension.

Results: The findings showed that students' implicit beliefs about intelligence and ability, and their intrinsic motivation and metacognitive awareness of the use of reading strategies were associated with their reading comprehension.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that the Chinese children who considered intelligence and ability as controllable were more likely to be intrinsically motivated to learn to read and to use various reading strategies to tackle problems when constructing meaning from text, resulting in a better understanding of text. However, as all the participants in the present study came from one Hong Kong primary school, caution should be exercised in generalising the findings of the present study to all Chinese primary students.

Keywords:

• attribution beliefs
• intrinsic motivation
• reading strategy
• reading comprehension

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Grant 10206938.28439.10000.302.01 of the Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research at the University of Hong Kong. I am grateful to Abby Chiang, Yit-mui Law, Ching-man Chan and Dennis Chan for their assistance in data collection, data input and marking of the test papers. I am also grateful to the students who gave their time to participate in the study.