PRIOR KNOWLEDGE ACTIVATION - INDUCING, ENGAGEMENT WITH INFORMATIONAL TEXTS

Failure to engage with informational texts is a problem frequently not ed at the high school level, at which students are expected to read in dependently. As a means of addressing this issue, a prior knowledge ac tivation strategy (PKA) was taught to ninth-grade students in which th ey were encouraged to make spontaneous connections between their perso nal knowledge and informational texts. Students who learned to use the PKA strategy consistently outperformed students in a main idea (MI) t reatment group and those in a no-instruction control group on applicat ion-level comprehension questions but not literal-level questions. A s econd study replicated the operations of the first study, with the add ition of an MI-PKA treatment designed to combine both strategies. Both the PKA and the MI-PKA combination groups performed higher on applica tion-level comprehension questions and demonstrated more positive atti tudes toward reading than the other groups.