DRTA Study Guide

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:__Candace Poovey______________________________________

Answer the following questions AS you read the article.

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

~Comprehension of informational texts requires accessing accurate, relevant knowledge, managing mental processes during reading within the confines of a limited working memory, and constructing a coherent mental representation through pruning and organizational processes.

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?

~Teachers should be concerned about activating prior background knowledge, because in some cases children have false or inaccurate background knowledge.  A child may be more interested in a text if he or she has some prior knowledge of it, but that prior knowledge will not be helpful if it is wrong.

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).

~The three instructional approaches that can be used to help primary grade students comprehend informational text are 1) picture walks, 2) KWL’s, and 3) directed reading-thinking activities.  Their common attributes include an emphasis on reader engagement and social mediation, activation of relevant prior knowledge, and anticipation of what information might be likely to be included in a text.  Children who use prior knowledge and make predictions are more likely to understand and recall what they read.  The picture walk format calls for students to preview the entire text before reading with a page-by-page discussion of predictions.  The KWL discussion is more open-ended than the other two and is more closely related to the text.  The KWL lets students tell what they already know about a topic, and what they would like to learn.  The DRTA does not include build-up before the reading.

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.

5. Who were the subjects?

~The participants 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.

~There were informational texts on science topics that were likely to be familiar to second-grade students.  The topics were spiders, the moon, how water changes form, and insects.

7. How long did the experiment last?

~About 10 weeks.

8. What were the experimental conditions?

~Each day, the same new book was introduced to all of the children for a total of 12 text selections during the intervention.  Assessments were only conducted on Day 3, so the treatments were tested using four different texts.  On Day 1, all groups began their sessions with a brief introduction to the topic for the week.  On Day 1 and Day 2, we read a new text following the prescribed procedures for the assigned intervention. On Day 2 and Day 3, I led the students in a brief discussion of declarative, conditional, and procedural strategy knowledge immediately before reading the text.  On Day 3, each group read the same new book, adhering to their designated treatment.

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

~Picture Walk – Before reading, a brief overview of the text was presented.  We engaged in an interactive discussion about the book as we worked through the book page-by-page, talking about the pictures, the text structure, and the student’s prior knowledge, and formulating predictions based on that information.  New vocabulary was introduced before reading the text.  The children then mumble read the text independently. After reading, they discussed whether their predictions were verified and collectively summarized the information from the text.

~KWL – On Day 1 and Day 3, a group KWL chart was made interactively.  The children discussed the topic and their input was written on the chart in the Know column.  The next step was for the children to generate questions about the topic that were to be placed in the “What I Want to Learn” column.  Lastly, they talked about the text and whether it answered any of the student’s questions.  If questions were answered it was written in the Learned part of the chart.

~DRTA – Before reading, the students formulated and justified predictions about the text based on the title, cover, prior knowledge, and if available, table of contents.  Then they mumble read that section of text. After reading each section of text, a brief discussion was held to verify predictions, summarize the information in the text, and generate new predictions for the next section of text based on the discussion about the text, pictures, and headings, if available.

~Control Group – The children had an opportunity to read the same informational texts that were read in the intervention conditions. Before reading I presented the same brief overview of the text that had been provided to the treatment groups. Then the children independently mumble read the new text. Independent reading was always followed by drawing a picture and/or writing about something they would like to share with the group based on the text.

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

~Vocabulary Recognition Task (VRT) is an experimenter constructed yes/no task used to estimate vocabulary recognition in a content area and to confirm that groups had similar levels of prior knowledge of the topic.  The task consisted of a list of 25 words; 18 of the words were related to the content and 7 words were unrelated.  Students circled the words that they both were able to read and related to the topic.  After the children selected words on the VRT, they additionally categorized those words under provided headings on a concept web.

~Maze was a multiple-choice cloze modification. It was a timed (three minutes), group-administered task. The original text read by the students was reprinted after the deletion of 10 content words. The score on the maze task was the number of correct responses.

~Free Recall was where students responded to the prompt, “Please tell me everything you can remember about the book. Also tell me anything the book made you think of.”

~Cued Recall was where each child was asked to answer three explicit and three implicit questions based on that day’s text.

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

~The picture walk and the DRTA both yielded statistically significant effects on the maze.

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)?

~DRTA procedures tended to demand higher levels of thinking by the students than did the other three procedures by requiring justification and verification of predictions.  Both the students and the teacher initiated the conversations.  Tangential information rarely entered the conversations, because they occurred immediately before or after reading a section of text. The immediate interaction around the text also helped promote consistent engagement, clarify confusions, and provide a vehicle for creating an accurate representation of text as well as assimilation with prior knowledge.

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?

~I believe this just means that each and every child learns in different ways and they are going to need to have different means of learning the materials.

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?

~Teacher’s play a very important role in constructing children’s mental representations from informational text.  They help students to come to conclusions about text they have read and to learn more new, useful information about the text.