Children's ability to comprehend main ideas in content textbooks

Abstract

This article describes an applied educational study which explored third and sixth graders' ability to comprehend main ideas after reading natural expository reading materials taken directly from elementary social studies textbooks. Results indicated that elementary students have much difficulty comprehending main ideas in textbook prose, and that the manner in which main idea comprehension is measured interacts with this ability. The discussion emphasizes concrete, practical suggestions elementary classroom teachers can employ to (a) develop strategies for teaching main ideas which require students to practice this skill within the medium of content textbooks, and (b) provide students more exposure to expository textbook prose in order to familiarize them with this distinctive genre and hence develop a schema for expository prose.Content textbooks contain vast amounts of information, all of which conceivably cannot be remembered. It is important, therefore, for readers to be able to identify central themes or main ideas in texts. This enables a reader to reduce, organize, and synthesize the information in a passage so that the significant ideas can be remembered, retained, and learned. Thus, an important textbook reading skill involves the ability to extract the central thoughts from a text; that is, to comprehend the gist or main ideas of a passage.Research investigating skilled readers' ability to comprehend central thoughts in expository (textbook) prose has suggested that adult readers retain main idea, gist information better than subordinate, detailed ideas (e.g.,

Locating Information in Text: A Focus on Children in the Elementary Grades

“…Questions about specific passage information were answered correctly by nearly three fourths of the students, but only about two thirds were able to answer main idea-type questions. Furthermore, performance on both types of questions increased substantially from fourth to eighth grade, particularly for informational passages.A great deal of research on reading comprehension supports the notion that children have difficulty understanding and remembering main ideas, particularly if those main ideas are implicit in the text (e.g., Baumann, 1983;Hare, Rabinowitz, & Schieble, 1989.;Kintsch, 1990;Winograd, 1984). For example, in the study by Hare et al (1989), fourth-, sixth-, and eleventh-grade students were asked to select or construct main ideas of informational paragraphs.…”

On Selecting "Considerate" Content Area Textbooks

“…One skill that has received research attention is finding the main idea. Unfortunately, many younger and less able readers tend to have difficulty identifying the main idea of expository text (Baumann, 1981(Baumann, , 1982(Baumann, , 1983Taylor, 1986;Tierney, Bridge, & Cera, 1978-79;Winograd, 1984;Winograd & Bridge, in press). Therefore, textbooks should have especially salient main ideas.…”

Effect of Rewritten Content Textbook Passages on Middle Grade Students' Comprehension of Main Ideas: Making the Inconsiderate Considerate

“…One explanation is that because recognition tasks are consistently less difficult than recall (i.e., constructive or generative) tasks (see Baumann, 1981Baumann, , 1983Baumann, , 1984, the recognition task failed to challenge the students adequately. However, because the students were able to recognize only 48% of the main ideas after reading original versions and only 50% of the main ideas after reading the rewritten versions, this hypothesis is discredited, as there was no ceiling effect for either group.…”

“…Although main idea instruction assumes an important place in educational curricula (Armbruster, Stevens, & Rosenshine, 1977;Baumann, in press;Hare & Milligan, 1984;Jenkins & Pany, 1980;Johnson & Barrett, 1981;Rosenshine, 1980;Winograd & Brennan, 1983), research with young and developing readers suggests that students are generally not facile at recognizing, recalling, or constructing the gist, theme, central thought, or main idea of expository prose passages (e.g., Baumann, 1981Baumann, , 1983Dunn, Matthews, & Bieger, 1979;Eamon, 1978Eamon, -1979Otto, Barrett, & Koenke, 1968;Taylor, 1980;Tierney, Bridge, & Cera, 1978-1979Winograd, 1984; see reviews by Baumann, 1982, and Winograd & Bridge, in press). Several instructional studies, however, have demonstrated that students can be taught to improve main idea comprehension of expository text.…”