A study of the effects of compressed speech on the listening comprehension of community college students

The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of various rates of compressed speech instruction upon the listening comprehension of community college students. The primary objective of the study was to determine the degree to which two types of community college students, developmental and non-developmental, could recall factual and interential information from an uninterrupted forty-two-minute presentation which had been compressed to: 0% (175 words per minute), 33% (275 words per minute), and 57% (400 words per minute). The ability of each type of student and treatment type to recall information over time was measured. The study was conducted at a large urban community college in the Winter and Spring of 1980. One hundred thirty-one developmental and non-developmental subjects participated in the study. These two classifications of students were randomized into one of three groups. The three experimental groups heard the treatment material presented at a designated compression rate, and took a treatment post-test. All experimental subjects took a delayed post-test two weeks following treatment. The scores of one hundred twenty participants were used in the Lindquist Type III analysis of variance with repeated measures which was conducted on the post-tests and delayed post-tests. The results of the data analysis revealed significant differences in type of treatment, type of student, and time of testing with the following results: (1) subjects hearing the presentation at 0% compression had the highest scores. There was no significant difference between the scores of the 0% and 33% treatment groups. (2) non-developmental subjects scored significantly higher than developmental subjects on the treatments and (3) scores on the post-test were significantly higher than the delayed post-test.