Reading-Study Strategies for Students - The Whole Book DR-TA (Directed Reading-Thinking Activity)

Regardless of whether students are in middle school, high school, or even college, we cannot assume that they know how to maneuver through and use their textbooks effectively. Particularly at the beginning of the year, it will be time well spent to begin to teach your students how to do so - especially regarding the particulars of how to learn using the texts in your discipline.

Textbooks

One means of having students do this in a structured way is the Whole Book Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DR-TA). This DR-TA is an important activity to conduct at the beginning of the year because it allows students to become familiar with the organization of the book (Spiegel, 1980). Skimming asks students to reflect on the relative difficulty of the text and to begin thinking about the amount of studying that will be involved in learning from this text. This is also a good time for teachers to share their expectations for using the textbook.

The Whole Book DR-TA may be conducted individually (in a tutoring situation) or as a whole class activity. Students' responses do not have to be stated aloud nor written out in complete sentences. Encourage students to have "internal monologues" as they go along.

It has been effective for me to model my own thinking about what I think will be included in a particular section and also to allow students to see that I am just conjecturing--supported conjecturing--but conjecturing, nonetheless. In other words, my internal monologue has the volume turned up for students to hear.

Students are asked to skim and scan the table of contents, the index, the introduction, the preface, the appendices, and specific features that are particular to their textbooks; e.g., in a mathematics textbook, the ratio of 'running text' to 'numbers,' diagrams, problems, 'boxes' (the type with - what students consider to be - extraneous information), and so forth. They are asked to skim and scan each of these parts one at a time and to provide responses as they go along. You will want to convey that it's not a speed trial.

Different items will catch students' eyes as they go through this process. Sometimes they will see their own last name in the index, or they will see a word that they know in a different context, and they will have to "check it out" to see if it is what they hope it is, or maybe one of the boxes will contain information that is interesting to them, or they will see a project mentioned that looks like it might be fun, or.... It is amazing how an activity that elicits some groans at first ends up intriguing a number of the students (and these are the ones who admit it!).

One hopes that students see some topics or terms that are familiar to them, but that they also see how foreign some of the material is. For some students, this will help them make a commitment to beginning their study program early, and not letting a few chapters slide by before the panic sets in. The discussions that ensue during the Whole Book DR-TA are extremely informative for the teacher as s/he hears likes, dislikes, questions, concerns, etc. A better picture of the students is formed after just one day of using this process than through many days of traditional, beginning-of-the-year classwork.

Reading-Study Strategies for Students - The Whole Book DR-TA (Directed Reading-Thinking Activity)

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