A Study of Four Attitudes and Reading Comprehension of Primary Six Students in Singapore

Abstract

Scores of 645 Chinese and Malay students from the Normal Stream* of six Primary Schools in Singapore in relation to pupils' attitude toward (1) teachers, (2) learning processes, (3) language arts and (4) mathematics and their (5) reading comprehension are com pared and contrasted to find answers to the following questions:

1. What are the correlations between the five variables for the two student groups?

2. Are there significant differences between the same variable across groups?

3. Would "clustering" of Malay students in some schools affect their performance scores?

The obtained statistics indicate that, except in one case, there is a positive correlation between all the variables for the two groups. There is a significant difference between three of the attitudes across groups with the Chinese doing better in the reading and comprehen sion test. Clustering does not seem to affect the reading ability of the Malays. It is concluded that for the Malays the home environment is a much more important factor than the school environment in their attempt to master the English language.