DRTA Research Article 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: Megan Williams
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).
Response: The reading processes that take place during 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. Good instruction should facilitate these processes with students and provide the explicit instruction and guided social medication that enables students to adopt cognitive behaviors that are invisible or performed tacitly by skilled readers.
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?
Response: Evidence shows that young children rely heavily on background knowledge in their interactions with text. Mediation that prompts young readers to activate relevant background information is an important support, but teachers must be sensitive to dialogue indicating that children may be relying on inaccurate or irrelevant prior knowledge. A study by McKeown and Beck with interactive read-alouds in kindergarten and first grade determined that extensive discussions around the students’ experiences led to inaccurate or limited recollection of the text. As a result, their text-talk read-aloud procedure calls for a focused discussion of text. Vosniadou found that naive beliefs are common and difficulty to change because true scientific concepts are abstract and frequently counterintuitive to daily experiences. Teaching students to “think like a scientist” demands an intentional examination and discussion of previously held ideas and hypotheses in direct relationship to the scientific concepts found in texts.
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).
Response: Three instructional approaches include: Picture Walk, Know-Want to Learn-Learn, and Directed Reading-Thinking Activity. Picture walk is commonly used with leveled text-small paperbacks that have been leveled, using a narrow gradient readability scale based on qualitative text features. The conversations typically occur as the teacher and students preview each page or few pages of a new book, before reading. The pictures are used for discussion of what the book is likely to be about. Two or three vocabulary words are explicitly introduced during the picture walk. The picture walk is used flexibly and in response to students’ needs and the challenges of a particular test. The picture walk does not adhere to a script or a generic verbal frame. Know-Want to Learn-Learn is a technique that enables teachers to assess the prior knowledge of students and to help students develop their own purposes for reading expository text. KWL is a process during which the teacher generates a discussion about a text topic and uses a chart or worksheet to record students’ statements about what they know, want to learn, and, after reading, what they learned. However, five studies performed were unable to find any significant effects of KWL for comprehension as measured by a standardized comprehension test or on a metacognitive awareness index. Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA) is an instructional framework that views reading as a problem-solving process best accomplished in a social context. The teacher’s role is to select an instructional level text, divide the text into meaningful sections, and facilitate discussion of each section of text. Students are responsible for establishing their own purposes for reading, generating predictions, justifying those predictions, independently reading the text, and verifying or revising predictions based on evaluations of information in the text during the teacher-led discussion of each section. The DRTA has been shown to be more effective than the other two methods.
All three methods are based on three common theoretical principles: 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 the text. 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 procedures, which are more tightly tied to the text. The DRTA does not include the extensive build up before reading that is a part of both the other two methods.
4. What is the purpose of the experimental study reported?
Response: 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. The focus was on the ways the differences in instructional approaches influenced the construction of meaning by novice readers.
5. Who were the subjects?
Response: The participants were 31 second-grade students in two demographically similar schools, in the same school district, in a midsize Midwest city. Originally there were eight groups of four students participating in the study-four groups in each two cycles of instruction. The cycles were conducted consecutively during the first half of the academic year with a three-week break between the cycles.
6. Describe the reading materials used during the intervention.
Response: Teachers recommended students from their classes who had an instructional reading level three to six months below grade level (Reading Recovery Levels 12 to 16 or Guiding Reading Levels G to I). The teachers used a Rigby Assessment System and weekly running records to determine each student’s reading level. For each lesson, informational texts were selected on topics that were likely to be familiar to second-grade students. Topics included those that had been introduced to the students in the first and second-grades. The sequence of topics for each group during both cycles was: spiders, the moon, how water changes form, and insects. All texts came from the descriptive subgenre.
7. How long did the experiment last?
Response: Data was gathered over 10 weeks, conducting two four-week periods of intervention within that time frame. Groups 1 through 4 from school A received the intervention during the first cycle, and Groups 5 through 8 from school B received the intervention during the second four-week cycle. There were 12 days of intervention in each cycle. Each group received each treatment in three days, with data being collected on the third day.
8. What were the experimental conditions?
Response: Each day a new book was introduced; total of 12 text selections during the intervention. On day one they began their sessions with a brief introduction to the topic for the week. They then completed a Vocabulary Recognition Task (VRT). On day one and day two a new text was read following the prescribed procedures for the assigned intervention. During week one, the children in all groups practiced a collective retelling after reading the first two texts. These sessions lasted for 20 to 30 minutes. KWL often took five to ten minutes longer than the other three methods. On day three, each group read the same new book, adhering to their designated treatment. A series of assessments were administered, which lasted 50-60 minutes. KWL sessions tended to take more time than the other three methods. The assessments were delivered in the same order each week: maze, VRT, vocabulary web, free recall, and cued recall.
9. Describe the procedures specific to the Picture Walk, KWL, DRTA, and the Control Group conditions.
Response: During the picture walk, guidelines were followed, which were recommended by Clay, Fountas, and Pinnell for the books at this particular level. Before reading, a brief overview of the text was presented. Then the class engaged in an interactive discussion about the book as the students 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. This method was the only method that specifically introduced new vocabulary before reading the text. After the PW, the children read the text independently.
On day one and day three, each group made a KWL chart interactively. After the topic was introduced the children discussed the topic. Their input was written on the chart in the know column. On day two and three, each child wrote what he or she knew on a personal KWL chart before it was shared and written on the large group chart. Then the information was categorized by the students. The next step was for the children to generate questions about the topic. Their questions were written in the “What I Want to Learn” column. Then the children read the entire text. After reading, the post-reading discussion began.
In DRTA, before reading, the students formulated and justified predictions about the text based on the title, cover, prior knowledge, and table of contents. Students predicted for a two-page or three-page section of text. They then read that selection of the 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. At the conclusion of the text, discussion was minimal about the overall text.
A noninstructional control group condition was used to compare the effects of providing reading opportunities in information text versus providing a social context for the activation of prior knowledge, setting personal purposes for reading, and generating and verifying predictions for the text. These children had the same opportunity to read the same information texts that were read in the intervention conditions. Then the students would read the text independently, which was always followed by drawing a picture and writing about something they would like to share with the group tested.
10. What measures were used to determine the relative effectiveness of the treatments? Describe the measures briefly.
Response: The measures used were vocabulary recognition task (VRT), maze, free recall, and cued recall. 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 25 words; 18 words being related to the content in the information texts and 7 words were unrelated foils. It was determined that the yes/no task is reliable and valid to measure of vocabulary assessment. The maze task was a multiple-choice close modification. It was a timed group-administered task. The original text read by the students was reprinted after the deletion of 10 content words. It was found that the maze was valid, reliable, and sensitive assessment of younger students. Free recall was when each child individually provided a free recall of the day’s text. Students responded to the prompt. Two raters parsed the texts into clausal units, developed tree diagrams to determine ideational hierarchies, and placed these ordered clausal units on coding sheets. Cued recall was introduced after free recall. Each child was asked to answer three explicit and three implicit questions based on the day’s text. The items were scored as correct or incorrect. A four point scale was used to produce weighted scores for each answer.
11. Which treatment(s) were found to be more effective in increasing students’ vocabulary knowledge and maze performance (p. 381)?
Response: All intervention groups made vocabulary gains. Students in all interventions made similar gains as they did during the picture walk. The small group setting seemed to be essential for these approaching-grade-level students to develop content area vocabulary that had previously been taught as part of the district’s science curriculum. Both PW and DRTA yielded statistically significant effects on the maze. Both procedures were more effective than KWL or the control procedures in facilitating fluent reading and micro-level comprehension. The page-by-page walk through of the text either before reading or during reading seemed to promote a close reading that enabled students to identify words automatically and to facilitate higher scores on the timed maze task. The DRTA and PW resulted in the students being more likely to select the most sensible word choices for the most sentences within the three minutes allocated to the maze task.
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)?
Response: This may be a result of the close reading facilitated by the DRTA instructional approach. Teacher guidance during the DRTA tended to direct the children’s attention to the important ideas and assist with difficult text concepts in a way that was not provided for in the other interventions. DRTA yielded the strongest effects on Cued Recall Points. The students were able to provide more information and more sensible justifications for their answers, even if they were not completely correct. DRTA procedures tend 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 teachers initiated the conversations. 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?
Response: I feel that this just proves children learn different ways. Not every child processes and recalls information the same. It was suspected that students would do better using the KWL, which is an intervention that encourages, documents, and honors students’ experiences. There was not a finding that supported this however. I feel that these findings support what I have always thought: Each child is unique, just like each one of these interventions. Not all of the same interventions will work for the same child.
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?
Response: I think teacher support is very important in children’s construction of mental representations from informational text. Teacher guidance during the DRTA tended to direct the children’s attention to the important ideas and assist with difficult text concepts in a way that was not provided for in the other interventions. Close interaction with the students helped them grasp the idea faster. Teachers are a very big influence and help when children are learning to read.
3 Comments »
{ RSS feed for comments on this post} · { TrackBack URI }
heatheryar Said:
on October 5, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Your answers were very complete. I liked that you gave so much detail to the answers to the questions. It shows that you want the full picture. Great job
coffeycd Said:
on October 5, 2009 at 11:25 pm
I agree with you Megan that this perfectly proves children learn differently. Each child takes information in better in their own way. It is remebering is done better in an individual’s own way.
Omer Said:
on November 17, 2009 at 2:55 am
Great job!
~Omer