The comparative effectiveness of teacher-made, commercially prepared, and standard textbook test-taking instructional materials upon students' language achievement as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test

A study was conducted to determine the comparative effectiveness of teacher-made, commercially prepared, and standard textbook test-taking materials upon students' language achievement as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test. The total population of 231 seventh-grade students of a city school system in Middle Tennessee who were involved in the study were randomly assigned to the two five-week experimental treatments or to the control group. One experimental group used teacher-made materials, and other used commercially prepared materials. The control group used materials deemed appropriate by their classroom teacher to implement the existing curriculum.;It was concluded that there was no significant difference in the means of the two experimental treatments. However, both treatments resulted in significant gains when compared to the control group.;Recommendations were made concerning the use of the different types of materials. Other studies were recommended to test the effects of a shorter experimental treatment and to determine if similar results can be obtained on the science and social studies subtests of the Stanford Achievement Test.;The covariant function of the Apple IIe computer program, A General Analysis of Variance Program for the Apple II/IIe, ANOVA II, version 1.1, was used to compare the achievement gains of the three groups as they related to the group effect, trial effect, and the group by trial effect. When four of the six null hypotheses were rejected, the data were further examined through use of the Tukey method, a post hoc multiple comparison procedure, to study the group effect to determine which pairs or combination of means differed. The same method was used to obtain statistical proof of the interaction of the treatments.