Effects of Age and Comprehension Skill on the Awareness of Nonfiction Text Structures

• In Event: Multiple Documents, Sources, and Structures

Abstract

Structural awareness, the ability to perceive and use the author’s organization of a text to organize one’s own understanding, is an important aspect of expository text comprehension We examined the development of structural awareness through the comparison of 4th, 6th, 7th and 9th grade students’ written recalls and main ideas. We also investigated whether overall reading comprehension skills moderated age differences in knowledge of problem-and-solution and comparison text structures. Awareness of text structure increased with age. This increase across grade levels was not moderated by whether students were classified as good, average, or below average in comprehension. Despite this increase, few age differences were found among the older readers. The findings provide important implications for instruction.

Authors

• Melissa N. Ray, The Pennsylvania State University

• Bonnie J. F. Meyer, The Pennsylvania State University

• Wendy Middlemiss, University of North Texas