In this meta-analysis, the authors synthesize results from 44 (quasi-)experimental studies on informational and narrative text structure interventions involving students in grades 4-6 in regular school settings. Findings show that text structure instruction had positive immediate effects on students' reading comprehension but that effect sizes…

This study was conducted in the province of Québec, Canada, among French-speaking Grade 6 students (n = 175) in the context of a school curriculum that does not clearly address text structure and main idea instruction. It aims to understand whether these students can identify informative text structures and main ideas in isolated paragraphs,…

The present study examined children's digital text comprehension of digital text types linear digital text vs hypertext, with or without graphical navigable overviews. We investigated to what extent individual variation in children's comprehension could be explained by lexical quality (word reading efficiency and vocabulary knowledge), cognitive…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language. Design/methodology/approach: In all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing…

This study examined the thinking processes students engage in while constructing graphic representations of textbook content. Twenty-eight students who either used graphic representations in a routine manner during social studies instruction or learned to construct graphic representations based on the rhetorical patterns used to organize textbook…

This case study examines features and processes of a sixth grade teacher (Jane) utilizing text sets as a tool for facilitating critical thinking. Jane's strong vision and student-centered beliefs informed her use of various texts to teach language arts as she worked to address demands of the Common Core State Standards. Text sets promoted multiple…

The aim of this study was to examine the contribution of transcription skills, oral language skills, and executive functions to growth in narrative writing between fourth and sixth grade. While text length and story content of narratives did not increase with age, syntactic complexity of narratives showed a clear developmental progression. Results…

The aim of this study is to investigate the perception levels of the messages of didactic fiction texts in fictive context and the student's perception levels of these messages. 80 students attending the grades of 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th 20 from each grade, are randomly selected as participants. Under the supervision of specialists, six fictive…

We evaluated the narrative and expository writing samples of 12 adolescents with language-learning disabilities (LLD) in Grades 6 to 12 for elements of microstructure (e.g., productivity, grammatical complexity) and macrostructure (genre-specific text structure elements) using an experimental measure. Writing samples were elicited with…

Mostly low-income African American and Hispanic teens (N = 192) were tested in (a) passage comprehension, (b) vocabulary ability, (c) cloze task performance, and (d) listening comprehension in the spring and vocabulary in the fall. Students were surveyed about reading (a) narrative, (b) expository, (c) teen culture, and (d) online texts.…

In this study, the purpose was to determine whether there was concordance among raters in the assessment of the writing performance using analytic rubric; furthermore, factors affecting the assessment process were examined. The analytic rubric used in the study consists of three sections and ten properties: External structure (format, spelling and…

One source of potential difficulty for struggling readers is the variability of texts across grade levels. This article explores the use of automatic natural language processing techniques to identify dimensions of variation within a corpus of school-appropriate texts. Specifically, we asked: Are there identifiable dimensions of lexical and…