When Science and Intuition Align: Using Text Structure To Make Essential Connections

If you have been in education for a few years, you’ve undoubtedly seen your share of trends come and go. We are fortunate to live in an era in which decades of research can help guide and substantiate a multitude of educational decisions. However, before these guidelines were available, educational decisions were often based on pure intuition. Intuition is a gift, cultivated through years of experience. Although in the absence of evidence (and far too often in education), it can lead one astray.

Instructional practices that are both intuitively appealing and research-based offer great potential for immediate and effective classroom implementation … the elusive “win-win.” The use of text structure to help students connect the salient features and ideas across text holds both intuitive appeal while encompassing a strong and promising research base.

Using Text Structure for Organization

According to one meta-analysis (2020), “Text structure is the organization of ideas, the relationship among ideas, and the vocabulary used to convey meaning to the reader.” As well, the essence of comprehension has been defined as “the ability to simultaneously extract and construct meaning from text" (Snow, 2002). It is in this ability to integrate relevant ideas across text that the connection among text structure and deep comprehension is both logically appealing and firmly based in research.

Indeed, the research base for explicitly teaching text structure began to accumulate more than 50 years ago. In 1975, Bonnie Meyer first described the five common organizational structures, stating that to deeply comprehend text, “students must select and logically connect only the most important information from the text.” Research from that time has continued to deepen and grow regarding the efficacy of the direct teaching of text structure, as is reflected in this blog, “Understanding the Basics: A Guide To Teaching Text Structure in Elementary School”.

 The implementation of daily text structure lessons indicates benefits for all students, including English learners and striving readers, across a range of grade levels, and with both narrative and expository texts (Pyle et al., 2017, Wijekumar, et al., 2018, 2020b).

Text Structure as Idea Units

If we pull the research lens back even further, it becomes evident that the integration of text structure within daily ELA lessons aligns with a body of research regarding learning in general; what our brains like best in terms of making deep and long-lasting connections.

A major factor contributing to comprehension is “the ability to perceive the meaningful relations between information units” (Bogaerds et al., 2020). This describes the crux of the cognitive integration theory, which proposes that idea units must be integrated from the sentence level into a more global understanding of the entire text (Kintsch; 1988, 2013). If the reader is aware of the overall structure of the text, these idea units are more readily connected within the text and to the overall understanding of what is being read. In other words, an awareness of overall text structure facilitates knowledge building rather than simply knowledge telling.

Think of a room in which a large collection of “stuff” is piled in the center. Your job is to organize these items. Think of how much more efficient the job would be if someone had come along and built and labeled shelving units to accommodate the organization of the pile of items! Perhaps overly simplistic, yet herein lies the intuitive appeal of explicitly teaching text structure. Readers have the “cognitive shelving” organized and labeled for incoming information from text.

Deeply comprehending text requires the reader to go beyond acquiring facts and begins with making preliminary connections at the sentence level. Additionally, an understanding of how these idea units connect throughout the text ensures a deeper understanding of what is being read. When students approach a reading selection with a well-defined expectation of text structure, it enables the reader to:

• Cognitively organize and store relevant information
• Disregard extraneous material
• Transform understanding rather than merely accumulating unrelated “piles” of facts and information

To me, this captures the essence of what it takes to cultivate students who are readers, going beyond the creation of those who can simply read.  

Don’t Miss Out!

Join me for an upcoming Voyager Sopris Learning^® webinar, Illuminating Text Structure from the Inside out: Using Text Structure to Improve Comprehension for Older Readers. In addition to exploring the research base supportive of text structure instruction, a strong focus on routines and strategies to do so will be presented. Learn more here.

Trust your intuition on this one, and I’ll see you there!

Learn More

References

Bogaerds-Hazenberg, S., Evers-Vermeul, J., & van den Bergh, H. (2020). A meta-analysis on the effects of text structure instruction on reading comprehension in the upper elementary grades. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(3), pp. 435-462. doi:10.1002/rrq.311

Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model. Psychological Review, 95(2), 163– 182. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.95.2.163

Kintsch, W. (2013). Revisiting the construction–integration model of text comprehension and its implications for instruction. In D.E. Alvermann, N.J. Unrau, & R.B. Ruddell (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (6th ed., pp. 807–839). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Meyer, B. J. (1975), The organization of prose and its effects on memory. North-Holland.

Pyle, N., Vasquez, A. C., Lignugaris/Kraft, B., Gillam, S. L., Reutzel, D. R., Olszewski, A., Segura, H., Hartzheim, D., Laing, W., & Pyle, D. (2017). Effects of expository text structure interventions on comprehension: A meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(4), 469-501. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.179

Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B.J., & Lei, P. (2012). Large-scale randomized controlled trial with 4th graders using intelligent tutoring of the structure strategy to improve nonfiction reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Technology Research and Development, 60, 987-1013.

Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B.J., Lei, P-W, Hernandez, A., August, D. (2018). Effects of web-based text structure instruction for 4-6th grade Spanish ELs reading comprehension. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(9), 1969-1996.

Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B., Lei, P., & Beerwinkle, A. (2020b). Supplementing teacher knowledge using web-based intelligent tutoring system to improve content area reading comprehension with 4th and 5th grade struggling readers, Dyslexia: An International Journal of Research and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1002/dys.1634