The study examined the use of expository text structure as a reading and writing strategy with 15 learning-disabled adolescents, 15 normally achieving adolescents, and 15 normally achieving fourth graders. Two reading tasks required students to recognize sequence or comparison-contrast text structure. The third task required students to write…

Presents the results of two studies where children were taught to identify textual cues, syntactic and semantic, in order to locate main ideas. The children also built graphic representations of these structures and were taught relevant questions to ask regarding comprehension. Results showed significant improvement, especially with older…

Describes a long-term project where middle school students were taught to visually represent key text ideas through idea-mapping techniques. Instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum along with regular textbooks and supplementary material. Positive effects were found in recall, comprehension, and learning. (MJP)