DIRECTED READING THINKING ACTIVITY

PURPOSE OF THE STRATEGY

Developed by Stauffer (1969) to promote active comprehension, the Directed Reading/Thinking Activity is based upon the idea that students can use their own experiences to comprehend the message of the author. This metacognitive strategy teaches students to acquire and activate their own purposes for reading. By setting their own purposes for reading, students develop their reading and thinking processes while the teacher, through his/her questioning techniques prescribes how the students will interact with the text.

DIRECTIONS:

STEP 1 PREDICTING – making hypotheses from small portions of the text. Begin by scanning the title, chapter headings, illustrations, and other explanatory materials. Have students make predictions on what they think the reading will be about. Next, based upon the reading of a small segment of the text, the teacher guides students to predict what will happen next. After these initial predictions, the students either view pictures or listen to short passages from the text, presented in the order that they occur naturally in the text. During this step of the strategy, the teacher's role is to both activate and agitate thought by asking students to defend their hypotheses. This is a time to guess, anticipate, and hypothesize. "What do you think?" Why do you think so?"

STEP 2

READING – students are asked to read the text to verify the accuracy of their predictions. Students are asked to support their predictions by locating the material in the text that will verify their responses. There are no right or wrong predictions, rather, some responses are judged to be more or less accurate than others. Reword the predictions so that they are accurate.

STEP 3

PROVING – During this step, students read back through the text and point out how they were able to verify their predictions. Students verify the accuracy of their predictions by finding statements in the text and reading them orally to the teacher. The teacher serves as the mentor, refining and deepening the reading/thinking process.

STEP 4

REPEAT STEPS 1-3 as you continue to read.

ASSESSMENT The teacher is able to assess several things from the DRTA. First, they are able to determine the ability of the students to read orally. Secondly, the teacher is able to determine the level of comprehension of the students. Third, the DRTA indicates how actively students are searching for meaning within a given text. These assessments inform subsequent instruction in the text. By use of a picture book as an introduction to the more difficult text, the teacher is able to engage readers in the subsequent reading and activate schema.