The Effects of the Shoot for the Goal Contest on Reading Performance for Sixth Grade Middle School Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of implementing the Shoot for the Goal contest on the reading performance of sixth grade students. This ten-week study used a quasi-experimental pretest/posttest research design with the students who participated in the contest serving as the treatment group and the students who did not participate in the contest serving as the control group. The measurement tool used in this study to indicate growth was the Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) Fall and Winter Reading and Language Arts Benchmark exams. The independent variable for this study was the Shoot for the Goal contest, and the dependent variable was the difference in the students’ reading comprehension performance on the AACPS Reading and Language Arts Benchmark exam. A t-test for independent groups procedure was used. These results (t = .597, df = 285, p =.551) suggests that the difference in the amount of increase in performance among students who participated (i.e. 5 percentage points) versus those who did not participate (i.e. 4 percentage points) was not statistically significant. In addition, a t-test procedure was used to compare the pretest versus posttest performance of males versus females, and these results (t = 2.309, df = 141, p = .022) suggest that the overall mean difference in performance between males (7.5) and females (2.5) on the Fall Language Arts Benchmark versus Winter Benchmark exams was statistically significant. Further research is warranted to analyze the effectiveness of contests on the reading performance of middle school students.