This study investigated the effect of instruction in a particular text structure on fifth-graders' ability to learn from similarly structured social studies material. Eighty-two fifth graders were assigned to either a structure training group that received direct instruction in recognizing and summarizing a conventional text structure (problem-solution) or a traditional training group that read and discussed answers to questions about social studies passages. Results indicated that structure training enhanced students' ability to abstract the macrostructure of problemsolution text read independently, as measured by responses to a main idea essay question and by written summaries of two passages. Does Text Structure/Summarization Instruction Facilitate Learning from Expository Text?Most learning from reading, both in and out of school, depends on the ability to read and understand expository text.Although the empirical evidence is weak, experts contend that children generally have more difficulty reading expository text than narrative text (Spiro & Taylor, 1980). Many factors may contribute to children's difficulty with expository text, including insufficient prior knowledge, interest, or motivation.As suggested by recent research in learning from reading, another contributing factor may be that children lack sensitivity to text structure, the way the ideas in text are organized. The effect of text structure instruction on middle grade children's ability to learn from reading expository text is the focus of the study reported here.Many current theories of reading comprehension assume, at least implicitly, that skilled readers automatically abstract a higher-order structure of the text (Meyer, 1975;Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983).This "macrostructure" (van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) Winograd, 1984; Taylor, 1986 (McGee, 1982;Meyer, Brandt, & Bluth, 1980;Taylor, 1980Taylor, , 1985.In these studies, awareness of author's text structure was indexed by the readers' use of the author's structure in organizing their own recall protocols. In the study by Meyer, Brandt, and Bluth (1980) Similarly, McGee (1982) found that fifth grade good readers used the author's text structure more and recalled more total and superordinate idea units than fifth grade poor readers or third grade good readers. Finally, Taylor (1985) examined the ability of sixth graders and college students to summarize passages from a social studies textbook. Compared to college students, sixth graders had difficulty understanding important ideas and/or including these ideas in either oral or written summaries. A conclusion from the Meyer et al. (1980( ), Taylor (1980( , 1985, andMcGee (1982) These strategies appear to be at least moderately successful in improving readers' recall of expository text.One limitation of these strategies is that they do not necessarily help the reader identify the macrostructure; the reader extracts a structure, which may or may not represent the "gist" of the text.Another approach to teaching tex...

The process of creation is a cognitive process. Perceiving, learning, thinking, and rememberingthis is the stuff of creativity. The creative process involves the acquisition of knowledge and skills, the transformation of knowledge into new forms, and the rendering of these forms into a shareable product. Each stage in the process entails cognition. It seems appropriate, therefore, to inquire about a cognitive model of creativity. In one way or another, the chapters in this part of the book all address this issue. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the creative process from the perspective of one particular aspect of cognition-metacognition. What Is Metacognition?Modem-day cognitive psychology recognizes the hierarchical nature of psychological processes that are involved in cognition. At the top of the hierarchy are the executive processes that oversee, regulate, and orchestrate the activities of cognition. These executive processes are known as metacognition. Metacognition includes both the knowledge and the controL that individuals have over their own cognitive processes. Control, or self-regulation, includes setting goals and subgoals, planning the next Bonnie B. Armbruster • Center for the Study of Reading, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820.cognitive move, monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of cognitive strategies, and revising cognitive strategies (Baker & Brown, 1984).Metacognition is currently a hot topic in cognitive psychology. In the past 15 years, literally hundreds of studies have been conducted in the name of metacognition. This research has had a significant influence on the area of learning, particularly learning from reading. Early metacognitive research focused on how, when, and why students have difficulty studying and learning. The research generally indicated that metacognition is a late-developing skill, with younger and poorer readers displaying less effective metacognitive skills than older and better readers. Later research in metacognition has concentrated on intervention research that is designed to overcome metacomprehension problems. This research has demonstrated the value of including metacognitive training in three areas:(1) skills-training and practice in task-specific strategies; (2) self-reguLation-instruction in the orchestration, overseeing, and monitoring of skills; and (3) awareness-information concerning a skill's evaluation, rationale, and usefulness (Baker & Brown, 1984). Adding these metacognitive components has contributed substantially to the success of cognitive skills training programs.Given the impact of metacognition on theory and practice in the area oflearning, it seems appropriate to inquire about the relevance of metacognition to the study of one of the most intriguing of cognitive processes-creative thinking. Specifically, what is

Considerate" content area textbooks are "user-friendly"-they are relatively easy to read, understand, and learn from. Recent research in cognitive psychology and reading suggests some features of content area textbooks that contribute to considerateness. This article addresses three of these features: Structure, coherence, and audience appropriateness. For each feature, the article describes the research basis for the feature, states briefly some problems with textbooks that we have observed in our analyses, and presents some practical suggestions for evaluating textbooks.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of using a particular type of instructional graphic, a "frame," on fourth and fifth graders' ability to learn from reading their social studies textbooks. Six fourth-and six fifth-grade teachers taught social studies using either frames or the instruction suggested in the teacher's edition of the regular classroom social studies textbook. The treatment was repeated in four rounds (replications) during the school year. The major result from the combined analysis of the four rounds is that for fifth graders but not necessarily for fourth graders, framing was a more effective instructional technique than was the instruction suggested in the teacher's edition.Improving Content Area Reading -2 IMPROVING CONTENT AREA READING USING INSTRUCTIONAL GRAPHICSStudents have difficulty understanding and learning from informational text. A recent summary of findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Applebee, Langer, & Mullis, 1989) includes this dismal conclusion about the reading ability of American students:The failure of 61 percent of the 17-year-olds to demonstrate the ability to find, understand, summarize, and explain relatively complicated information, including material about topics they study in school, suggests that most students leaving secondary school do not have the comprehension skills often needed in the worlds of higher education, business, or government. 1983). Mayer (1984Mayer ( , 1989) presents an oversimplified, but nonetheless useful, conceptualization of the cognitive processes involved in meaningful learning from text. According to Mayer, meaningful learning depends on three basic processes--selecting, organizing, and integrating information.The first process, selecting, involves paying attention to the information in the text and, in particular, focusing attention on information that is relevant to the goals or task demands of the learning situation. The second process, organizing, involves arranging the units of selected information into a coherent mental structure. Mayer (1984) refers to this step as "building internal connections," or constructing logical relationships among ideas in the text. The third process, integrating, involves connecting the coherently organized information to existing cognitive structures. This process is also referred to as "building external connections" because it entails linking information from the text to information external to the text (but internal to the reader) (Mayer, 1984).The more elaborate and rich the internal and external connections among units of information, the more available and accessible the information is for later use (Prawat, 1989). Availability and accessibility of knowledge are hallmarks of meaningful learning.Expert, or skilled, readers are adept at all three basic cognitive processes, but novice (younger or poorer) readers are not. Among the readers who appear to have difficulty with these processes when it comes to learning from informational text are c...