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 1: Participants

[cos]

In the first paragraph, you might be describing criteria which you will use to pick a neighborhood and schools and a list, but it seems more likely that you're describing an actual, already-chosen neighborhood, two already-selected schools and a list. That could be written a little more clearly (especially since it's possible that you already selected the neighborhood, but not which schools - so clarify would help remove that ambiguous possibility

Comments part 2: Pretests

[cos]

For the paragraph beginning with "Tasks will be administered in the following order", I think that sentence should go at the end, because the tasks listed in order come after the paragraph. It's mildly jarring to read "in the following order" and then see that the next sentence is not the beginning of a list of tasks in order

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

Comments part 4: Posttests

[cos]

In the scripted re-telling, does the person administering the test have free reign to ask other questions, or are they constrained to ask every child exactly the same set of questions? For example, "The child can describe what the characters look like and how they typically behave" - well, maybe the child can do that, but didn't consider both halves of that (appearance and behavior) to be necessary to answer the question "what is _character_ like?" - so do they get scored based on what the omitted, or does the interviewer prompt them further to see if they can give a more complete answer

Comments part 5: the rest

[cos]

"The dependent variables are the retelling accuracy score, the picture sort accuracy score and a composite listening comprehension score