The Effects of Instructional Cloze Lessons on the Divergent Production of Third-Grade Students

J. P. Guilford's "structure of the intellect" provides a system that explains the intellectual abilities of students and identifies major types of productive thinking. A study was conducted to examine whether one of these types--divergent production, which focuses on responses of an individual's own creations--could be enhanced through the use of an instructional cloze procedure. Subjects were 92 third-grade students from three different schools, equally divided into control and experimental groups. Students in the experimental group received regular reading instruction with the addition of 27 instructional cloze lessons. Students in the control group received regular reading instruction with work in reading centers in lieu of the cloze instruction. A Quasi-Cloze Divergent Production Test was used as pretest and posttest. Results indicated that the divergent production of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group. The findings suggest that the cloze procedure can be an effective technique in increasing the divergent production of third-grade students. (FL)