Research Instruments
Six progress achievement tests were used as six posttests for six lessons respectively in the present study. The reason for using this type of test was that the progress achievement tests were intended to measure the progress that the students were making. Since progress was towards their reading achievement of the course objectives, these tests too were related to these objectives. They were prepared by the researcher based on the contents and types of exercises employed in the class as well. In other words, the tests were covering the course content and all the test items corresponded to the materials covered in the course content. The focus content validity was on the adequacy of the samples of the test. To satisfy content validity, the tests were intended to measure the representative samples of whatever the study wished to investigate.
Each test was mainly a modified cloze test type. Each of the six posttests was given to the students after each of the six lessons respectively. The reason to use several ‘one-shot case’ studies was that their results would possibly help confirm the reliability of one another, and the decrease, the increase, or the consistency of the results could be noticed.
In addition, the participants in the study were told in advance that all the test scores were to be used as parts of their final course evaluation. The reason to use all the test scores for the final course evaluation was that the students would possibly take the exams intentionally and responsibly. Thus, the results of the tests would reflect some internal validity the data obtained to certain extent. That is to say, these outcomes of the experiment were a true function of the factor, the CTL instructional approach, which the present researcher had selected rather than other factor we had not controlled. In other words, the outcome (the scores obtained) was a function of the factor the present research had selected and it could account for the reading progress the students made.
Findings and discussion
Finding 1 A set of programmed CTL reading lessons was developed by the researcher to teach English reading comprehension for a group of MBA students. The students were given the treatment, the programmed CTL materials, to work through. Following each of the six three-hour lessons, the students were given a posttest on reading comprehension. The average posttest scores and their average percentages were shown in Table 1. From the data obtained, the percentages of the posttest scores of each one-shot case study ranged from 68.70-79.87. In fact, the criterion for the students to pass this course was to obtain the scores of 60 or above. These average result, then, seemed fairly satisfactory. The results of the six posttest scores with the total average of 74.68 seemed to support the efficiency of the CTL approach to a certain point.