Text structure instruction in Dutch primary education: Building bridges between research and practice

Abstract

Many primary school students in the Netherlands struggle with reading comprehension, especially when it comes to higher-order comprehension skills, such as summarizing. Scientific literature has suggested various ways to foster text comprehension, for example by providing explicit instruction about text structures (e.g., cause-effect, chronology), as this might foster the construction of a solid mental representation of the text: a coherent situation model (e.g., see Meyer & Ray, 2011). A text structure is the underlying skeleton of a text that organizes all the information. Text structure can be defined as the organization of ideas, the relationship among the ideas and the vocabulary used to convey meaning to the reader” (Pyle et al., 2017:1; see also Armbruster, 2004). What if we would teach children in primary school about text structures? Our meta-analysis showed that explicit instruction about narrative and informative text structures yields positive immediate effects on students' reading comprehension, and that effects vary across outcome measures: recall tasks (g = 0.37), summarization (g = 0.57), reading comprehension tests (g = 0.25), and text structure knowledge tests (g = 0.38) for students in the upper elementary grades. The moderator analysis revealed that content-related features such as a focus on paragraph-level structure, active construction of graphic organizers, and rule-based summarization techniques moderated the effectiveness, but these effects also varied with outcome measure. The mixed-methods study examined the state-of-affairs analysis of the current Dutch primary school reading curriculum for grades 4 and 5. The data are based on a materials analysis of reading comprehension lessons (n = 80) in eight textbooks for grades 4 and 5, supplemented with semi-structured teacher interviews (n = 29) and lesson observations (n = 11). Main findings were (1) a lack of alignment between lesson goals, theory, and assignments, (2) a strong focus on practicing strategies, (3) limited declarative knowledge about strategies and text structure, (4) little opportunities for selfregulated strategy application, and (5) strong emphasis on individual question answering. Therefore, a lesson series on text structure was developed in a design-based research in close collaboration with four teachers. Based on data from lesson artefacts, logbooks, panel interviews, and lesson observations, this study revealed several difficulties related to the design principles and their implementation in practice, and identified several areas in which teachers' pedagogical content knowledge about reading comprehension could be strenghthened. This lesson series was then tested for its effectiveness among 201 students in a switching-panels replication design with three measurement occasions. There were positive effects on writing skills for all students, but the effects on reading, summarizing, and metacognitive knowledge varied between intervention groups. This variability in effects raised questions about the exact lesson implementation. In the final study, we closely monitored three teachers and their students in another implementation of the intervention. Implementation fidelity scores varied across teachers and lesson phases, with the lowest scores for collaborative learning (51%) and the highest for explicit instruction (91%).This study generated useful insights for the professionalization of teachers and reinforcement of teaching materials for reading comprehension instruction.