A total of 168 fourth and sixth grade students participated in a study to examine two aspects of children's ability to apply structure while reading. The first part of the study investigated the amount of detail that must be provided in order for students to apply successfully a desired perspective (schema). Students were identified as either good or poor readers and placed into control or experimental groups. All students were given a short passage to read, with readers in the control groups asked to highlight any material they thought to be important and readers in the experimental group asked to highlight material related to a prescribed topic. They were also administered a recall task. The results showed that both fourth and sixth grade students recalled more perspective-related material when given a perspective. The second part of the study examined age and reading ability differences in student awareness of an idea unit's structural importance. The methodology used was the same as in the first experiment, with the exception that students also completed a recognition task in which they chose from a group of sentences those that had appeared in the passage. Reading ability was found to interact with idea unit importance on both recall and highlighting measures. Both measures showed good readers to be more sensitive to the structural relevance of the material they were reading. (FL)