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).
”Cognitively, comprehension of informational texts requires accessing accurate, relevant knowledge, managing mental process (both top-down and bottom-up) during reading within the confines of 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 mediation that enables students to adopt cognitive behaviors that are invisible or performed tacitly by skilled readers. Over the years, research has indicated that both explicit cognitive strategy instruction and high level social interaction around text are important keys to improving text comprehension and concept development.”
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?
”Naive beliefs are common and difficult to change because true scientific concepts are abstract and frequently counterintuitive to daily experiences. Naive beliefs tend to be narrow but internally consist explanations that attempt to explain and organize sensory, lived 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. High level questioning by the teacher, self-explanation and explanations to peers by students, and negotiation of meaning are the necessary components of discussions surrounding science concepts with older readers.
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, Know-Want to Learn-Learn, and Directed Reading-Thinking Activity are the three instructional approaches. All three methods have three common theoretical principles, which are 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. In the Picture Walk picture walk approach, the teacher uses leveled text materials, where the students views the cover and the pictures to make predictions about the story and discuss the predictions before reading the story. In the Know-Want to Learn-Learn approach, the children discuss what they already know about the text, what they want to learn from the text and after reading the text the discuss what they learn, there is usually a chart made for this approach as well, recording each piece of information. In the Directed Reading-Thinking Activity approach, the students are responsible for establishing their own purposes for reading, generating prediction, 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.
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 grouped context. The focus of the investigation was on the ways the differences in instructional approaches influenced the construction of meaning by novice readers.
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. There were 25 African-American, 3 European-Americans, 1 Latino, and 2 Asian/Pacific Islanders. Of the participants, there were 16 boys and 15 girls. Teachers recommended these students because they had an instructional reading level three to six months below grade level. The teachers reported that reading and comprehending informational texts was challenging for these students.
6. Describe the reading materials used during the intervention.
”For each lesson, I selected informational texts on topics that were likely to be familiar to second-grade students. The texts addressed science topics that had been taught to the students in their first- and second-grade science curriculum as part of the state science content standards. The specific sequence of topics for each group during both cycles was: spiders, the moon, how water changes form, and insects. Each week, I used a set of three different informational texts containing common information about the same topic, resulting in a total of 12 texts or leveled little books during the study. To minimize the possible effects of different text structures, all texts came from the descriptive subgenre, also referred to as list, attribution, or definition and example. Descriptive texts are organized around a series of main ideas that are followed by an explanation of each main idea or example of the main ideas. All text ranged from Reading Recovery Level 11 to Reading Recovery Level 16 or Guided Reading Level G to Level I, the students’ instructional reading levels.
7. How long did the experiment last?
The experiment consisted of a total of ten weeks.
8. What were the experimental conditions?
”Group 1 through 4 from School A received the intervention during the first cycle, and Group 5 through 8 from School B received the intervention during the second four-week cycle. Following two days of the individual pre-experimental screening to ensure that readers shared a common instructional level, I conducted a 45-minute orientation session with each group. There were 12 days of intervention in each cycle (three consecutive days for each of four consecutive weeks). Each group received each treatment for three days, with data collected only on the third day. On the day following the conclusion of the intervention cycle, I interviewed students about the comprehension strategies and intervention preferences.”
9. Describe the procedures specific to the Picture Walk, KWL, DRTA, and the Control Group conditions.
Picture Walk- A brief overview of the text was presented. 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 prediction based on that information. Questions were frequently asked to keep the discussion going. Attention was drawn to 2 or 4 new content vocabulary words that were on the VRT. With these vocabulary words, the students were taught meaning of them and the students were coached in decoding strategies, perhaps chunking or using a common rime. After the PW, the children mumble read the text independently and then as a class, they discussed if their predictions were verified and collectively summarized the information from the text.
Know-Want to Learn-Learn-On Day 1, the class designed a KWL chart. On Day 2 and 3, the students recorded what they already knew about the topic on their own personal KWL charts and then shared with the class to have it added to the class KWL chart. Next, the students were asked to generate questions that they might have about the topic, writing it on their personal charts and then adding the questions when open to discussion. Finally, the students mumble read the text and afterwards the students discuss whether or not the questions on the chart had been answered.
Directed Reading-Thinking Activity- “Before reading the students formulated and justified predictions about the text based on the title, cover, prior knowledge, and if available, table of contents. Students predicted for a two-page or three-page section of a text. Then they mumble read that section 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, if available. At the conclusion of the entire text, discussion was minimal about the overall text.
Noninstructional Control Condition- “A noninstructional control condition was used to compare the effects of providing reading opportunities in informational text versus providing reading opportunities in informational text versus providing a social context for the activation of prior knowledge, setting personal purposes for reading, and generating and verifying predictions for a text. The children had an opportunity to read the same informational texts that were read in the intervention conditions. 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)- The 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 in the informational texts and 7 words were unrelated foils. Students circled the words that they both were able to read and related to the topic. After the children selected words on the VRT on Day 3, they additionally categorized those words under provided headings on a concept web. A student scored a “hit” (H) when the word was circled correctly or a “false alarm” (FA) if an unrelated word was incorrectly circled. The proportion of words truly known, P (K), was determined with the following formula: P(K)=P(H)-P(FA)/1-P(FA). Webs received two scores, the total number of the words correctly sorted by category and the percentage of words correctly selected on the VRT, correctly sorted by category.
Maze- The maze task 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. All maze texts ranged from 254 to 267 words. The use of the complete text provided the students with a familiar, cohesive passage. There was always a three to five sentence lead-in without omissions. While most of the other assessments in this study were used to measure awareness of text macrostructures, maze provided insight into micro-level processing, general reading, and monitoring for meaning. The statistically significant higher scores on the first five items than the second five items seems to indicate that the maze tasks used in this study may also reflect the fluency of these novice readers.
Free Recall- Individually each child provided a free recall of the day’s text. 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.” Two raters parsed the texts into clausal units, developed tree diagrams to determine ideational hierarchies, and placed these ordered clausal units in coding sheets. Students retellings were then analyzed using coding sheets. Importations (text-related information that is not explicitly stated in the text) and intrusions (errors or unrelated information) were written on the code sheet and scored.
Cued Recall- After the free recall, each child was asked to answer three explicit and three implicit questions based on that day’s text. First, the items were scored as correct or incorrect as a measure of general comprehension. Both correct and partially correct items were scored as correct. Next, a four point scale was used to produce weighted scores for each answer.
Post-Intervention Interview- Interviews were recorded on audiotape and transcribed. The interview was to determine if students gained knowledge of the two common strategies, activation of prior knowledge and prediction. The question surveyed three types of strategy knowledge, declarative (what the strategies were), procedural (how to perform the strategies), conditional knowledge (when and why the strategies are useful). The children were able to refer to a new informational text that was provided as a means of making the discussion less abstract. The final two questions related to the instructional methods. After a poster-aided review of the four instructional methods, the students were asked to reflect on their preferred approach for enjoyment and helpfulness. Finally, a descriptive analysis of information, gathered in the interviews, was performed.
11. Which treatment(s) were found to be more effective in increasing students’ vocabulary knowledge and maze performance (p. 381)?
All intervention groups made vocabulary gains. This finding demonstrates that the use of informational texts with novice readers does extend their vocabularies. It seemed likely that the picture walk would yield greater vocabulary gains than the other methods because two to four tested words were explicitly taught before reading each text. Both the PW and DRTA yielded statistically significant effects on the maze. A comparison of effect sizes suggests that a slightly larger proportion of variance is explained by PW than DRTA. Both procedures were more effective than KWL or the control procedures in facilitating fluent reading and micro-level comprehension.
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)?
Although the students in all four groups were monitored during mumble reading to be sure that they could read the text and were, in fact, reading the 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 intervention. It would seem that the rich KWL discussions would have led to the deepest and broadest topic knowledge. In fact, DRTA yielded the strongest effects on Cued Recall Points. The scaffolded interactions during reading, actively justifying and verifying predictions, integrating text-based information with prior knowledge, and having an immediate opportunity to discuss new concepts seemed to help these novice readers when they were called on to respond to question about the text. They were able to provide more information and more sensible justifications for their answers, even if they were not completely correct.
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 was expected that KWL, an intervention that encourages, documents, and honors students’ experiences, would yield retellings that included more content or broader content than a text-based intervention such as the DRTA or the PW. The coding sheets indicate more similarity by individuals across interventions than by intervention. All oral retellings were placed on a coding sheet to indicate the sequence of the retelling, as well as the hierarchy of ideas. Analyses did not reveal significant differences by intervention for the number of total ideas recalled or differences in importations of outside 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?
It is important for a teacher to help students understand what they are reading. The teacher should asks questions about the text in order to help broaden the children’s intake of the text they are reading. It is important that children make predictions before reading, have new vocabulary introduced, and then have them see if their predictions were proven correct or not, this will help them to think outside the box and to add intellectual information to their knowledge.
