Article Review

            In the article, The Impact of Using Blogs on College Students’ Reading Comprehensions and Learning Motivation, by Hui-Yin Hsu and Shiangkwei Wang, was very appealing yet surprising.  The authors conducted a study to evaluate the affect new media and online literacy's had on young adult’s college reading skills and how college professors handle new media integration. They compared the results of 100 students in a developmental reading course.  Of the 100 students, 40 used the blogs and 60 used traditional means of completing their reading assignments. 

The results of the study indicated that blogging had a positive effect on retention rate and student-to-student interaction and surprisingly, no improvement on their reading performance.  It is easy to understand how blogging had a positive effect on students’ interaction with peers, because it gently forces them to interact with each other by posting and responding  to their posts.  I also think it is creates a safe means of networking that might carry to the professional world outside of the classroom.  As far as the retention rate is concerned, perhaps it is because the blogging students had the ability to read each other’s postings and ideas and maybe they were able to getting a better picture from different points of views.

 I was surprised to learn that there was no improvement to their reading performance. I would have thought that there would have been a significant improvement in their reading performances because of the increase of reading and reflecting. Maybe because the instructors were not confident with the technology, the results are skewed.  I think this subject should be studied again but with instructors who are seasoned and confident in this new type of media.