DRTA

(Answer the questions in this study guide, save the file, then copy and paste into your blog.)

Study Guide: Dougherty Stahl, Katherine A. (2008)’ The Effects of Three Instructional Methods on the Reading Comprehension and Content Acquisition of Novice Readers. Journal of Literacy Research,40:3,359 — 393

Name:___Heather Yarber____________________

 

Answer the following questions AS you read the article.

1. Describe in broad stokes the reading processes that takes place during comprehension of informational text (p. 362, under Construction of Meaning and Concept Development with Informational Texts).

For the comprehension of informational texts, a student must be able to relate it to prior knowledge that they have learned over the years. A student must also be able to access this information fairly easily, and build a mental picture of the data that is being processed in the brain. Dougherty Stahl states, that students must be able to “access accurate, relevant knowledge, manage mental processes (both top-down and bottom-up) during reading within the confines of a limited working memory, and constructing a coherent mental representation through pruning and organizational processes” (362).

2. Specify the effect that background knowledge may have on constructing mental representations from informational text. Why should teachers be concerned about activating prior knowledge?

Students create a foundation with background knowledge, to build new information upon. Teachers should be concerned that they are activating this prior knowledge because students don’t know that this is one of the most effective ways to process and store new memories.

3. What are the three instructional approaches that can be used to help primary-grade students comprehend informational text? Describe their common (p. 365) and distinctive features (p. 363-5)

Picture Walk – (PW) teachers show students the pictures and guess what the story is about based on the pictures. PW’s are used to introduce new texts.

Know-Want to learn – Learn – (KWL) Used to access student’s prior knowledge and to utilize the student’s drive to read an expository text.

Directed-Reading Thinking Activity – (DRTA) a problem solving process best accomplished in a social context. Students are responsible for generating their own predictions, and justifying and revising those predictions.

The common features of these approaches are that they engage the reader. The methods activate student’s prior knowledge, and the student makes predictions about what will happen in the text. Also, when students use these methods in one setting, they can learn to transfer these abilities to other situations as well.

4. What is the purpose of the experimental study reported?

“The purpose of this study was to explore how the PW, KWL, and DRTA might influence developmental reading abilities and content acquisition when used with informational text in the primary reading group context”(367). The researchers wanted to find out how the methods would affect students reading abilities, and knowledge of what is occurring in the stories, when they used informational text in conjunction with the literary books.

5. Who were the subjects?

The subjects were, “31 second-grade students in two demographically similar schools, in the same school district, in a midsize Midwest city”.

6. Describe the reading materials used during the intervention.

The experimenters used informational texts that were familiar with second-grade students. The researchers used the “replicated Latin Square within subjects repeated measures design”.

7. How long did the experiment last?

She gathered data over ten weeks, conducting two-four week interventions within that time frame.

8. What were the experimental conditions?

The experimental conditions included a variety of intervention strategies that students and teachers could use to allow them to further understand something that they were reading.

9. Describe the procedures specific to the Picture Walk, KWL, DRTA, and the Control Group conditions.

Picture Walk – Present a brief overview of the text, have an interactive discussion about the book as you go through the book, page-by-page. Talking about pictures, sentence structure, student’s prior knowledge, and formulating predictions based on that information. The PW was the only method that introduced new vocabulary before reading the book. The children would then, independently read the text. As a group the previous predictions would be speculated upon, and then the class would summarize the text as a group.

KWL – For the first three days the students would work on collaborating to make a group chart, as well as a personal chart. They then created categories, which were likely to fit the information that they were learning. The children then generated questions about the text, using the table of contents as a guide. After this, the children read the text. After reading, the class would have a discussion and fill in the class chart to see if the book answered any of the questions that they had. This process would also be reinforced by students doing it independently.

DRTA – Students formulated opinions about the contents of the book using the front cover, prior knowledge, the title, and if available the table of contents. Students would predict for two or three pages of text, then they would read that section. Afterwards a discussion would take place to verify the predictions that were made, or to change the predictions that were made. New predictions would then be made about the next section of text until you went through the entire book. When finished, with the book there is minimal discussion about the contents of the text.

Control Group – The researcher would give a brief overview of the text and then the students would mumble read the books. They would then draw a picture or write about something that they thought was interesting, based upon the text.

10. What measures were used to determine the relative effectiveness of the treatments? Describe the measures briefly.

Vocabulary Recognition Task (VRT) – The students were evaluated for entry level word knowledge, intermediate, and to determine which of the methods were the most superior in helping children increase their vocabulary skills.

Maze – Students were given a text to read, and then a new text was printed with 10 words omitted. The children would then have to determine what the deleted word was through the use of multiple choice.

Free-Recall – The students were asked to tell the rater everything that they knew about the story, and then the rater placed their informational knowledge on a scale and rated it.

Crude-Recall – After answering the free-recall question, the students were asked to answer three explicit and three implicit questions, based on the text. The questions would be scored as correct or incorrect and then the answers were weighted, based on their thoroughness.  

11. Which treatment(s) were found to be more effective in increasing students’ vocabulary knowledge and maze performance (p. 381)?

All of the methods were effective in increasing students’ vocabularies. Both DRTA and PW increased the students maze performance. Fluent accurate reading is stimulated through the social interaction of students.

12. Students’ comprehension of the texts was greater under the DRTA condition than KWL and the control conditions. What do you think explains DRTA’s advantage over the KWL condition (p. 382)?

The teacher guidance during the DRTA tended to direct the students attention to important concepts that was not tended to in the other concepts. DRTA demands higher levels of thinking than other methods because it demands justification and verification of predictions. The interactions around the text developed a clarified, more detailed picture for students than other methods.

13. It was found that the treatments did not differ in the quality and quantity of students’ retellings (p. 384). In other words, students were not differentially affected by the treatments in the way they integrated textual information with prior knowledge. What does this finding mean in terms of the different emphases employed by experience-based (KWL) vs. text-based (DRTA) treatments?

It means that both methods are just as effective in integrating students’ previous knowledge in what they are learning. It is more important for students to organize information so that they can effectively recall the information.

Answer the following question AFTER you read the article.

14. In light of the findings from this study, what conclusions can you draw about the role of teacher support in children’s construction of mental representations from informational text?

The teacher support is essential in students creating a clear representation of what is occurring in the text, and the connections that they can make to the outside world. However, it is also important that students are able to talk about the important parts of the text through a class discussion.