Improving English Reading Skill through the Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) Strategy at Nursing Student

Reading is an integral part of the entire learning process experienced by students while studying at school. Reading can increase vocabulary and knowledge of grammar and syntax. DRTA (Directed Reading Thinking Activity) is a technique that encourages students to make predictions while they are reading. The research was to describe the process reading skill understanding and improving, implementing reading strategy (DRTA) at 3rd grade students in the 5th semester of the Bachelor of Nursing study program STIKES Bina Sehat PPNI Mojokerto. The research method was Classroom Action Research (CAR) with one cycle. The result shows that The Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) strategy can help students understand the contents of the reading. Students also find it easier to answer the questions posed according to the content of the reading and also easier to retell the contents of the reading they have read using their own language according to their understanding.

Task Optimization Leads to Human-like Top-down and Bottom-up Attention during Reading Comprehension

Attention is a complex system involving multiple interactive components that jointly regulate information processing in the brain. It has been hypothesized that the computational goal of attention is to optimally integrate information under task demands, and evidence has been provided in relatively simple learning and decision making tasks. It remains unclear, however, whether this hypothesis can explain attention distribution in more complex real-world tasks that engage multiple attention systems. Here, taking advantage of the development of attention mechanisms in deep neural network (DNN) models, we investigate whether human attention during real-world reading comprehension tasks can be explained as a consequence of task optimization. In a goal-directed reading task, participants read a passage to answer a question. Eye tracking results show that the attention on each word, quantified by the fixation time, is modulated by both the top-down reading goal and lower-level visual layout and textual features. When trained to perform the same goal-directed reading task, DNN models yield human-level performance and naturally evolve human-like attention distribution, with deep layers tuned to the reading goal and shallow layers tuned to textual features. Further experiments suggest that different training tasks separately contribute to goal-directed and text-based attention. In summary, the results strongly suggest that human attention can be interpreted as a consequence of task optimization during real-world reading tasks.

Deep Neural Networks Evolve Human-like Attention Distribution during Goal-directed Reading Comprehension

Attention is a key mechanism for information selection in both biological brains and many state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs). Here, we investigate whether humans and DNNs allocate attention in comparable ways when seeking information in a text passage to answer a question. We analyze 3 transformer-based DNNs that reach human-level performance when trained to perform the reading comprehension task. We find that the DNN attention distribution quantitatively resembles human attention distribution measured by eye tracking: Human readers fixate longer on words that are more relevant to the question-answering task, demonstrating that attention is modulated by the top-down reading goal, on top of lower-level visual layout and textual features. Further analyses reveal that the attention weights in DNNs are also influenced by both the top-down reading goal and lower-level textual features, with the shallow layers more strongly influenced by lower-level textual features and the deep layers attending more to task-relevant words. Additionally, deep layers’ attention to task-relevant words gradually emerges when pre-trained DNN models are fine-tuned to perform the reading comprehension task, which coincides with the improvement in task performance. These results demonstrate that DNNs can naturally evolve human-like attention distribution through task optimization. The results suggest that human attention during goal-directed reading comprehension is a consequence of task optimization and the attention weights in DNN are of biological significance.

DIRECTED READING ACTIVITY (DRA) APPLICATION IN ENGLISH READING COMPREHENSION CLASSROOM

This research manages to analyze the effectiveness of DRA in enhancing students ‘skill in reading comprehension. The researchers carried out the research at SMP N 4 Takengon, in which they found that teachers faced some problems in teaching reading comprehension to students. To figure out the answer, the research applies quantitative research with experimental approach. After statistically obtaining and interpreting the data, the study concludes that Directed Reading Activity (DRA) method is able to increase students reading comprehension skill. This is because that Directed Reading Activity (DRA) is a teacher strategy in reading comprehension that emphasizes on instructional support before, during, and aftermath the reading. Meanwhile, the research found that this strategy is also able to increase and build stronger student vocabulary and reading skill. In conclusion, the DRA strategy is effective in improving students’ ability in reading comprehension, and also building their vocabulary.

The Implementation of Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) to Improve Students’ Reading Comprehension.

The goal of this research is to look into the use of Directed Reading Thinking Activity to improve students' reading comprehension in the tenth grade at SMAN 1 Tanete Riaja. The following research questions were addressed in this study: 1) How does the implementation of Directed Reading Thinking Activity (henceforth DRTA) improve students' reading comprehension?2) What are the students' perceptions toward the DRTA strategy's implementation? This study employs a quasi-experimental design with both an experimental and a control group. The experimental class was taught using the DRTA strategy, while the control class was taught using the conventional strategy. The participants in this study were chosen at random and were divided into two classes: class X-1, which consisted of 32 students as the experimental class, and class X-2, which consisted of 30 students as the control class. The data was gathered through a reading comprehension test and a questionnaire. According to the findings of this study, using the DRTA method increases students' scores more than using the conventional strategy. The experimental class has a mean score of 76.40, while the control class has a score of 50.3. It indicates that the DRTA strategy significantly improves students' reading comprehension and makes a positive contribution to their cognitive development. Furthermore, the results of the questionnaire show that the majority of students respond positively to the implementation of the DRTA strategy in the classroom.

Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) to Improve Reading Comprehension for 7th Grade Students at SMP Negeri 1 Surabaya

The purpose of this research was to increase students' achievement in reading comprehension by implementing the Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA) strategy to the 7th grade students at SMP Negeri 1 Surabaya in the academic year 2020/2021. Each cycle of classroom action research consisted of three meetings and included four steps: planning, action, observation, and reflection. The data were gathered through the use of two instruments: observation and test. The results indicated that students made great progress in their ability regarding to the reading comprehension. Pre-test mean score was only 67.28, but improved to 72.42 in cycle I and 81.22 in cycle II. The pre-test of the highest score was only 78 and improved to 82 to 90 in subsequent cycles. Meanwhile, the lowest pre-test score was 60, and the lowest post-test score ranged from 62 to 68. In case of the students who passed the tests, while only 6 students (16.67%) passed the pre-test, there were significant improvements in post-tests, with 12 students (33.33%) passing in post-test cycle I and 29 students (80.56%) passing in post-test cycle II. This research was stopped in cycle II due to the fact that the criteria for success were met in a percentage of 80.56%, with 29 students passing the post-test in cycle II, based on the Minimum Mastery Criteria (KKM) standard of > 76.

ACTUATING READING COMPREHENSION THROUGH GENRE-BASED DIRECTED READING THINKING ACTIVITIES (G-BDRTA) VIEWED FROM CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

The significance of reading comprehension for learners’ English mastery makes English teachers need to help learners to activate their background knowledge related to texts being read and promote the use of reading techniques. In this study, researchers applied the genre-based directed reading thinking activities (G-BDRTA). Genres here are oriented to provide learners with various text types for reading activities. Consequently, this study was aimed at actuating learners’ reading comprehension through genre-based directed reading thinking activities (G-BDRTA) viewed from critical thinking skills. This study was classified as an experimental study using non-equivalent control group design. This study was conducted at SMAN 1 Lingsar. There were 62 learners involved in this study. The learners were divided into two groups and each group embraces 31 learners. One group becomes an experimental group which is subjected to the G-BDRTA strategy and the other group is subjected to the control group treated using student-team-learning (STL) strategy. To find out the data, researchers used a reading test and critical thinking test as research instruments. Then, the data were analyzed using Two-Way-ANOVA. Based on the data analysis, there is a significant effect of G-BDRTA strategy on students’ reading comprehension viewed from critical thinking skills.