The effects of the story map method on the reading comprehension and story writing skills of 4th-grade students

This study aimed to determine the effects of the story map method on the reading comprehension and story-writing skills of 4th-grade primary school students. This is a quasi-experimental study conducted with 39 4th-grade students receiving education in the district of Çüngüş in the province of Diyarbakır in Turkey in the academic year of 2019-2020. In the study, 9 stories were included throughout 9 weeks, and a pretest-posttest design was employed. To measure reading comprehension, the Reading Comprehension Scale developed by Akça (2002) was utilized. Some items in the scale were modified based on the story that was going to be used in the implementation. The skill of the students in writing their own stories was measured based on the elements of the stories in the story map developed by Akyol (2005). When the students were instructed to write their own stories, the topic of their stories was determined based on the Turkish course curriculum. While making the measurements, the average of the two scores determined by two different observers was used to increase the reliability of the measurement. Parametric and non-parametric two-group comparisons were used to identify any differences between the scores of the experimental and control groups and their pretest and posttest scores. The normality of the distribution of the data was checked using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The analyses were carried out using independent-samples t-test, paired-samples t-test, Mann-Whitney U test and Wilcoxon T test. The results of the study showed that: 1) There was no significant difference between the pretest scores of the experimental and control groups in terms of their reading comprehension skills. 2) There was a significant difference between the posttest reading comprehension scores of the experimental and control groups in favor of the experimental group. 3) There was no significant difference between the pretest scores of the experimental and control groups in terms of their skills in writing their own stories. 4) There was a significant difference between the posttest scores of the experimental and control groups in terms of their skills in writing their own stories in favor of the experimental group. 5) There was a significant difference between the pretest and posttest reading comprehension scores of the experimental group in favor of their posttest score. 6) There was no significant difference between the pretest and posttest reading comprehension scores of the control group, where only the standard curriculum was implemented. 7) There was a significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the experimental group in terms of their skills in writing their own stories in favor of their posttest score. 8) There was no significant difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the control group, where only the standard curriculum was implemented, in terms of their skills in writing their own stories. Consequently, as a result of the implementation of the story map method, it was seen that the reading comprehension and story-writing skills of the students in the experimental group were positively affected. Keywords: Story map, reading comprehension, story-writing