Research On Relationship Of Prior Background Knowledge, Interest And Reading Comprehension

Interest and its relationship with learning are important research subjects in education psychology. Since 1980's, research about the relationship of interest and learning has been developing rapidly and has achieved encouraging fruits in the Western. However, there are only a few systematically quantitative researches on interest in our country. In the whole background of competence education going further and all kinds of interest teaching continually coming up, in view of foreign and domestic theory achievements on interest researches, the purpose of this paper is that providing reliable and applicable theory support and guide for all kinds of instruction by systematically researching into the relationship of prior background knowledge, interest and reading comprehension grades, and then providing supplement for the interest content of education psychology.This thesis puts out two important hypotheses:(1)In text reading comprehension, the values of correlation are not all significant between prior background knowledge (domain knowledge and topic knowledge) and interest (situation interest, topic interest and reading interest).(2)In text reading comprehension, reading interest has importantly positive role of reading comprehension.For testing the first hypothesis, the method of correlation analysis was used and T test also used to compare between groups after grouping. For testing the second hypothesis, the method of correlation, partial correlation analysis, regression analysis and path analysis was used, then F test was used to compare among groups.By deeply quantitative research, this paper comes to a few conclusions:Firstly, the values of correlation are also very small and not significant between domain/topic knowledge and situation/topic/reading interest. It indicates very weak correlation between them. It has no definitely result about the form of correlation between domain/topic knowledge and situation/topic/reading interest.Secondly, reading interest including the component of situation interest and topic interest, but has more the feature of situation interest.Thirdly, during text reading, topic knowledge and reading interest have more influence to grades of reading comprehension.Fourthly, topic interest has more important impact on the process of deep text information, but no influence on surface text information process. Reading interest has more important influence on the middle and low level of text information process, but has no influence on the deep text process.In the part of discussion, it explains that why knowledge and interest has no significant correlation.Finally, it discusses the limits of the research, concludes a few important points agreed by the most foreign researcher, and narrates a few important problems waiting for saluting and the new trends of future research.