Teaching Elementary Students To Comprehend Expository Text

The first activity carried out by the research team will be to develop instructional strategies to teach students how to identify and understand compare/contrast text structures and cause/effect structures. The research team will then carry out three studies designed to examine the effects of integrating explicit instruction about text structures into regular teaching. The study will take place in classrooms of second grade students of mixed abilities in urban schools with large proportions of minority students. The first study focuses on compare/contrast text structures, using content drawn from the social studies. Classrooms of students are randomly assigned to receive instruction according to one of three different approaches: (1) instruction in which explicit instruction about the compare/contrast text structure is embedded into the social studies content, (2) instruction using the same reading materials as in the first approach, except without the emphasis on the compare/contrast text structure, or (3) instruction unaltered from the teachers' normal educational practice. The second and third studies use the same design except that they focus on instruction in cause/effect text structures rather than compare/contrast structures. The research team will compare student performance from the various groups of students using a variety of measures designed to assess their learning of both the content and their understanding of the text structures and then use the data to further revise and improve the instructional approaches.