Poetry as instructional text in a community college course

The tendency of many educators to use a singlecommunicative genre, usually prose, to instruct hasgone on for decades.This quantitative study exploredthe effects of poetry as instructional text on agroup of community college students' attitude towardpoetry and on their reading and writing scores. Thestudy--including discussions on compensating for aninsufficient background in poetry,discussions forteaching poetry, and the selection and sources ofappropriate poems--compared students who receivedpoetry as instructional material and students whoreceived traditionally organized prose—both narrativeand non-narrative—instruction aimed toward the sameobjective.The results show there is not an apparentsignificant difference in group means for allattitude scales. However, the posttest mean attitudescale for poetry was significantly higher than thepre-test mean when both groups were pooled together,and the increase for the experimental group wasslightly higher than those in the control group. Theanalysis shows that there is potential for meaningfulliteracy development associated with the use ofpoetry as the communicative genre.