In need of critical comments

[sykotropic]

Prompted Retelling

At the conclusion of the fairy tale, children will be asked to immediately respond to scripted questions that allow the child to retell the story in their own words.   The purpose of re-telling a story is to assess the child’s understanding.   A scripted retelling is being used based on pilot testing results that indicate

Comments

Comments part 3: Treatments

[cos]

I think it would be clearer to establish that all three groups will be read Puss in Boots - and why - before going into how each group's treatment will differ. I was momentarily confused when reading that paragraph because at first it seemed you were saying that only the control group would be read that story, but then I realized you meant that the control group would get the story twice instead of getting a pre-treatment and then hearing the story only once. And then later I realized that was a mistake, and that actually the children in the experimental groups would hear the story once, but with prompts that the control group doesn't get. I think all of that confusion wouldn't have happened if the paragraph had just started by telling me about the story that all three groups get, and you only later talked about the differences in treatment between groups.

"In each of the experimental conditions, the text will be introduced with a brief training to familiarize the child with each scenario."
...
"Children assigned to the control condition, who will hear the story two times, will also hear the training story and asked the same question as above."

In that case, why not start by saying that children in all three groups will get this pre-training, and then describe the pre-training? Is anything gained by separating this into two parts, first describing the pre-training for children in the experimental groups and then saying the control group also gets it? If you did that for a reason, that reason is not clear to me, so perhaps you could make it more obvious.

Finally: I don't think you described how the two experimental groups differ. Was that intentional? Do they both get the same prompts during the reading?

Edit: Oh, you actually did! " After this pre-training, the children in the experimental conditions will be read a story using one or another of two types of dialogic prompts: “wh” questions that focus on the skill of recall, and open ended prediction questions. " - this means one group gets "wh" questions, and the other group gets open-ended prediction questions.

I missed that on my first two readings, and thought that the sentence describing kinds of questions applied to both groups. I only got it because it seemed strange that you wouldn't describe the differences between the two groups, so I went back and re-read it yet again, and figured out what you meant. I guess I'm saying that was easy to miss, and you might want to write a separate sentence about each experimental group to make it obvious.